The Spontaneous Use of Cardinal Number Gestures

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

Integrative Statement

Cardinal number (CN) gestures have been speculated to play a role in children’s early number development as they may help to bridge the gap between children’s innate representations of numbers and number words due to their iconic nature (Gunderson et al., 2015). The words used to label sets are arbitrary; there is no inherent ‘two-ness’ or even ‘set-ness’ about the word “two”, whereas the gesture for two (index and middle finger held in a V shape) it not only a conventional symbol in our culture but also physically describes two with the number of outstretched fingers.
Previous research shows that children both recognize and produce CN gestures at least by the age of 2 years (Gibson et al, under review). Children who are subset-knowers are also more accurate at labeling sets with CN gestures than with number words (Gunderson et al, 2015). However, these studies observed CN gestures in a highly-controlled laboratory context. What do spontaneous CN gestures look like in everyday life?
59 children and their parents were filmed in their homes engaging in typical daily activities for 90 minutes every 4 months from when the child was 14 months old to when the child was 58 months old. We searched the videos for all uses of CN gestures 1-10 used by the children and primary caregivers. We described the frequency of production as well as the context in which the gesture occurred (e.g. what the gesture referred to and whether it was accompanied by a number word or not).
Spontaneous CN gestures use was very rare. Across all 12 sessions, parents produced an average of 4.63 CN gesture tokens (SD = 7.35), with a range of 0-35 and a median of 1, and children produced an average of 7.85 (SD = 9.23), with a range of 0-48 and a median of 5. Children’s CN gesture frequency increased over time (r=0.92, p<0.01) as did the proportion of their number talk that was accompanied by CN gestures (r=0.68, p=0.015) whereas parents’ CN gestures use was stable (r=0.22, p>0.4). This study also provides evidence that parents’ use of CN gestures is correlated with their children’s use of CN gestures. We find that children of parents who produced at least 1 CN gesture across the 12 sessions produced more CN gesture tokens than children of parents who never produced a CN gesture (t(57)= 2.52 p=0.014; FIGURE 1).
The results of this study provide insight into how children and parents typically use CN gestures and can inform areas for future experimental research. For instance, because children able to accurately identify and use CN gestures at an early age (Gunderson et al., 2015) given that such gestures are rare in children’s everyday lives suggests that CN gestures may be fairly easy for children to learn. Thus, even a short, light-touch intervention could be effective in increasing children’s understanding of CN gestures and potentially their cardinal number knowledge.

Authors

• Madeleine Oswald, University of Chicago
  Presenting Author

• Dominic Gibson, The University of Chicago
  Non-Presenting Author

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

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

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