Poster #12 - Are Some Math Talk Types More/Less Related to Concurrent Math Skills? Examining Preschoolers’ Quantifier Talk

• In Event: Poster Session 03

Abstract

Children’s mathematical skills prior to school entry are important predictors of later math achievement and overall educational attainment. Prior literature suggests that parent and child math talk during everyday interactions predicts preschoolers’ mathematical abilities (Gibson et al., 2020). The majority of this literature has focused on the importance of number talk, and much less research has examined the relations between other types of math talk, including the use of quantifiers, and preschoolers’ mathematical skills. Thus, our aim was to examine whether quantifier talk was associated with preschoolers’ mathematical skills, controlling for number talk use. Here, we recorded parents’ and preschoolers’ (N = 163, M_Age = 4.45, SD_Age = 0.30) conversations during three dyadic interaction tasks. During the Book task dyads shared a wordless picture book. During the Magnet task dyads attempted to recreate a figure of an animal using the provided magnetic shapes. Lastly, during the Grocery task dyads were given pretend grocery shopping toys to play together. Parents’ and preschoolers’ talk were transcribed and coded at the utterance level for occurrences of number and quantifier talk (see Table 1 for complete list of quantifier terms). Non-Math Talk utterance frequency was included as a covariate in all regression analyses to account for overall rates of parent and child talk during the interactions unattributed to numerical or quantifier language. In addition to observing dyadic interactions, we measured children’s math abilities via the Woodcock-Johnson Applied Problems subtest (WJ-AP III; Woodcock, McGrew, & Mather, 2007), exact number knowledge via an adapted Give-N task (GAN; Wynn, 1992), approximate number processing via a non-symbolic number comparison task (ANS; Halberda & Feigenson, 2008), and expressive vocabulary skills via parental report on the Developmental Vocabulary Assessment for Parents (DVAP; Libertus et al., 2015). Table 2 presents results for all four regression models, one for each of the four child outcomes. Overall, across all models predicting children’s mathematical skills, child quantifier talk emerged as a significant predictor (p’s < .005), controlling for all other child and parent talk predictors and child age. Thus, our findings suggest that significant concurrent associations are observed between preschoolers’ overall (and more specific) mathematical knowledge and the types of language used by parents and preschoolers during informal interactions, noting the particular associations between preschoolers’ use of quantifier talk and their mathematical skills. Building on past work showing the importance of children’s comprehension of quantifier terms (King & Purpura, 2021), here, we identify preschoolers’ use of quantifiers as important for mathematical skill development above and beyond their number word use. Notably, these associations held even after controlling for parents’ and preschoolers’ use of number talk and non-math-related talk, and preschoolers’ age. In the future, careful work will need to explore how quantifier knowledge has been previously defined, and the extent to which numeric and spatial quantifiers are included in operationalizations of preschoolers’ math language.

Authors

• Jorge Manuel Carvalho Pereira, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Leanne Elliott, University of Pittsburgh

• Shirley Duong, University of Pittsburgh

• Diva Kothari

• Dominique Lopiccolo

• Heather J. Bachman, University of Pittsburgh

• Elizabeth Votruba-Drzal, University of Pittsburgh

• Melissa E Libertus, University of Pittsburgh