How Many Fingers am I Holding Up? The Answer Depends on Experience

• In Event: 2-194 - Number Development: Insights from Cardinal Number Gestures

Integrative Statement

By school age, children can use their fingers to perform early math, like addition and subtraction. In the preschool years, however, monolingual English-speaking preschool children tend to process number gestures as unanalyzed wholes rather than use the one-to-one (finger-to-quantity) correspondence. Previous research has shown that children between two and five years of age are more accurate at processing number words than number gestures and are more accurate at processing conventional number gestures than unconventional ones.
The purpose of the present studies was to test how preschool experiences might modify children’s interpretations of number gestures. Specifically, we reasoned that children who experienced different types of one-to-one finger configurations to convey a single quantity would become sensitive to the one-to-one correspondence in number gestures earlier (Study 1) and those who experienced arbitrary number gestures would not (Study 2).
In Study 1, we compared French-English and German-English bilingual children’s ability to interpret conventional and unconventional gestures with that of English monolingual children. German- and French-speaking adults show differences in use of finger configurations compared to English-speaking adults (e.g., Germans prefer the thumb to indicate one while English speakers prefer the index finger). We reasoned that the bilingual children would have greater exposure to different types of finger configurations than the monolingual children and would therefore be better able to interpret novel, unconventional number gestures better than monolinguals. We showed children unconventional number gestures (such as two index fingers held up) and asked them to put the corresponding number of objects into a box. As predicted, both groups of bilingual children performed better than English monolingual children in interpreting unconventional number gestures, but only for quantities of one and two.
Some Chinese speakers use conventional one-handed number gestures for quantities of six through ten (e.g., a thumb and pinkie held up means six). In Study 2, we compared Chinese-English bilingual children who knew these Chinese gestures with Chinese-English bilingual children who did not and with English monolingual children. The Chinese-English bilinguals who know the Chinese gestures would not have exposure to different types of number gestures with one-to-one correspondence and so should not show the same advantage in processing unconventional gestures as the bilingual children in Study 1. This study also allows us to rule out the possibility that the results in Study 1 were due to a bilingual advantage in cognition. The methods were the same as in Study 1. As predicted, the bilingual children who knew the Chinese gestures were more likely to interpret unconventional gestures arbitrarily (i.e., influenced by the written and/or Chinese gesture forms) than children in the two other groups.
Taken together, these results suggest that experiences in the preschool years can influence children’s sensitivity to the one-to-one correspondence in number gestures. Specifically, exposure to different types of finger configurations referring to the same quantity can lead children to an earlier sensitivity to the one-to-one correspondence. We discuss possible reasons that this sensitivity emerges only for small quantities.

Authors

• Elena Nicoladis, University of Alberta
  Presenting Author

• Paula Marentette, University of Alberta-Augustana Campus
  Non-Presenting Author