Navigating Number Concepts Across Development

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Abstract

How we acquire and master number concepts – like counting, adding, and subtracting – has been a source of considerable debate and interest. While we possess rich intuitions about these concepts from birth, what factors affect the acquisition and use of number concepts throughout the lifespan? We present four papers that address this puzzle, each emphasizing distinct methodological approaches, including examining typical and atypical development, as well as utilizing behavioral and neurophysiological measures.

Paper 1 shows that children’s acquisition of number concepts is strongly predicted by fluid language input: children with hearing loss perform significantly worse on both symbolic (e.g., counting) and non-symbolic (e.g., perceptual) number tasks, with the onset of language access (i.e., age of hearing aid/cochlear implant) mediating this relationship. Paper 2 examines how parents structure their children’s number input, finding that parents avoid magnitude (bigger/smaller) and ordinal (before/after) language when talking about numbers, preferring to use those terms for spatial and temporal relations. Paper 3 demonstrates that kindergarteners can dynamically extend number words to their perceptual representations of number, length, and area, despite limited experience estimating in some dimensions (i.e., length, area) and even when given novel units (e.g., calling a collection of 3 dots, “one”). Finally, Paper 4 provides a model of how elementary math concepts, including addition and subtraction, are encoded in the brain.

Together, these findings highlight the role that language plays in the acquisition of number concepts and help to identify mechanisms that support the extension of number words across our cognitive and perceptual experiences.

Sub Unit

• Cognitive Processes

Chair

• Denitza Dramkin, University of British Columbia (UBC)

Individual Presentations

• Language Input Matters for the Development of Numerical Concepts: Evidence from Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing Children - Presenting Author: Stacee Santos, Boston College; Non-Presenting Author: Hiram Brownell, Boston College; Non-Presenting Author: Marie Coppola, University of Connecticut; Non-Presenting Author: Anna Shusterman, Wesleyan University; Non-Presenting Author: Sara Cordes, Boston College

• Parents’ and Children’s use of Magnitude and Ordinal Relational Vocabulary - Presenting Author: Madeleine Oswald, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Michelle A Hurst, University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Kierra D. Thompson, The University of Chicago; Non-Presenting Author: Susan Cohen Levine, University of Chicago

• How Children Map Number Words to Their Perceptual Representations - Presenting Author: Denitza Dramkin, University of British Columbia (UBC); Non-Presenting Author: Darko Odic, University of British Columbia (UBC)

• Arithmetic Encoding in the Human Brain - Presenting Author: Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas, Stanford University