Children’s Early Knowledge of Cardinal Number Gestures

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

Integrative Statement

How do children transition from preverbal conceptions of numerical quantity to a full understanding of symbolic number (e.g. number words)? A surprisingly unspecified aspect of early number development is children’s use of cardinal number gestures (e.g. holding up three fingers to indicate “three”). Although, such number gestures are widely assumed to play a role in children’s early number development, the specifics of this role are not well understood.
One proposal is that number gestures serve as a bridge between nonsymbolic and symbolic representations of number. Cardinal number gestures are iconic in that they represent quantity through direct one-to-one correspondence between fingers and the items in a set. They can also be used as summary symbols to represent and communicate about specific quantities (akin to number words). Previously, we have shown that children who are in the process of learning the meanings of number words are more accurate when labeling sets using gestures than speech, suggesting they may take advantage of the iconicity of number gestures.
More recently, we examined whether children’s conception of number gesture goes beyond purely iconic, item-based representations to something more closely resembling symbolic number words. In Experiments 1-3, we compared preschool children’s ability to identify the number of fingers raised in number gestures to their ability to identify the number of dots in an array. In both instances, the gestures or dot arrays were presented for 1 second on a computer screen in order to prevented children from counting. The results showed that unlike children’s estimation of dot arrays, which became less accurate as the size of the set increased, children remained surprisingly accurate when identifying the number of fingers in the gestures for 1 through 5. This suggests that when enumerating number gestures, children did not rely on the same numerical estimation system that they employ when enumerating dot arrays, indicating that they may map quantities to the overall configuration of canonical number gestures.
To confirm this, Experiment 4 also presented children with 1-second displays of number gestures. On key trials, the number of fingers in the gesture conflicted with the configuration of the gesture (e.g. one finger was digitally removed to give a hand four total fingers but all those fingers and thumb extended into a canonical five-gesture configuration, see Figure 1). Analyses revealed that young children’s estimates of the number of fingers in each gesture reflected the hand configuration and not the actual number of fingers, suggesting children form configuration-number mappings akin to arbitrary symbolic representations of number.
Together these findings support the view that number gestures could serve as a useful bridge between nonsymbolic and symbolic conceptions of number. As an even stronger test of this proposal, we are now measuring children’s abilities to match number gestures to quantities, match number gestures to number words, and number words to quantities in a single study.

Authors

• Dominic Gibson, The University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Jacob R. Butts, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Talia Berkowitz, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan Goldin-Meadow, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

• Susan C. Levine, University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author