Latine Caregivers' Spatial Language and Children's Early Math Skills

• In Event: Parental Support of Children’s Early Mathematics Learning

Abstract

Children’s exposure to math talk during everyday activities contribute positively to the development of a range of early math skills, including spatial abilities. While early spatial development is still a burgeoning area of research, the majority of work has focused on White US families, or has compared children from East Asian and Western English-speaking countries. Given the variability with which languages represent space, and cultural differences in parent-child everyday interactions, it is not clear whether the same significant associations between parental math talk, especially spatial talk, and child outcomes is present for children from other cultural and linguistic backgrounds. The lack of research with families from diverse cultural and linguistic groups limits our knowledge base and the applicability of findings to inform broader intervention efforts. The present study addressed this existing gap by investigating Latine mothers' spatial language during a teaching task and its relation to their preschoolers' early math skills.

Method
Participants were 75 Spanish-speaking and Spanish-English Latine bilingual parents and their preschoolers (Mage = 47 months; SD = 8.00; 47% girls). Forty-five percent of parents were born in Mexico; 32% in the US; the remaining 23% in other Spanish-speaking countries. Mothers had on average 11 years of formal schooling (SD = 3.13). Mothers were asked to organize a birthday picnic for oversized stuffed animals and to teach their child how to set the table for the party. Interactions were videotaped and then transcribed by native Spanish-speakers using ELAN (Max Planck, 2018), following a standardized transcription system (MacWhinney, 2000). Maternal and child math talk, as well as accompanying gestures were coded for pragmatic context (e.g., directive, informative, elicited) and type of spatial concept (e.g., shape, location). Reliability was determined with 20% of transcripts. Children’s mathematical and expressive language abilities were assessed using the Birthday Party (Ginsberg & Pappas, 2016), and the EOWPVT-SBE (Martin, 2013), respectively.

Results and Discussion
About 63% of the caregivers spoke primarily Spanish during the interaction, the remaining 34% spoke English or code-switched. Preliminary results show that on average, parent-child interactions lasted about 10 minutes, ranging from 5 to 19 minutes, with an approximate average of 120 dyadic utterances. One third of caregivers’ talk contained math concepts and spatial language was the most frequent. In general, mothers led the interactions through directing children’s math actions (i.e., descriptions of objects, actions or intentions), and the provision of information. Spatial language was used mostly to direct children’s mathematical actions, most frequently to indicate location without specific coordinates. Differences across languages were found, such that English-speaking mothers used less motion words as compared to Spanish-speaking mothers. Initial correlations analyses, controlling for child language skills, show that caregivers’ total math talk, but not spatial talk, was significantly but moderately related to children’s geometry skills. Results are discussed in relation to how language structure and cultural practices intersect to support children’s early math development.

Authors

• Verónica Mesalles, New York University
  Presenting Author

• Maria Fernanda Ahumada, University College London
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gigliana Melzi, New York University
  Non-Presenting Author