Previous research has demonstrated a link between children's ability to name canonical finger configurations and their mathematical abilities. This study aimed to investigate the nature of this association, specifically exploring whether the relationship is skill and handshape specific and identifying the underlying mechanisms involved.…

This study investigates how the approximate number system (ANS) and young children's symbolic skills jointly develop and interact. Specifically, the study aims at disentangling the directionality of the association between ANS acuity and a wide range of symbolic skills that reflect 4- to 5-year-olds' symbolic quantitative knowledge (enumeration…

Children's arithmetic performance is dependent on the arithmetic task format, but little is known about how domain-specific and domain-general abilities contribute to solving diverse arithmetic problems. In this study, 145 Italian typically developing children between the ages of five and six, who have not yet received formal schooling, were…

Bilingual children exhibit enhanced working memory (WM) skill relative to monolingual children, which could have implications for early mathematics development. Competency in mathematics is supported by conceptual and procedural mathematical knowledge, and numerical knowledge is in turn supported by underlying cognitive processes such as WM.…

This study used a person-centered approach to examine mother-daughter dyad behaviors when jointly solving addition problems during a card game. The goal was to identify maternal and child profile behaviors during the interaction as predictors of children's autonomous addition accuracy and strategy use at the end of first grade. Videotaped…

It is imperative to identify contextual factors contributing to the development of early math skills, considering their role in later academic achievement. To pursue this goal, the present study investigated the paths connecting parental beliefs and practices during the preschool years to children's numeric skills at the end of kindergarten…

Research has demonstrated that providing labels helps children notice key features of examples. Much less is known about how different labels impact children's ability to make inferences about the structure underlying mathematical notation. We tested the impact of labeling decimals such as 0.34 using formal place-value labels ("3 tenths and 4…

The principle of inversion--that a + b - b must equal a--requires a sensitivity to the relation between addition and subtraction that is critical for understanding arithmetic. Use of inversion, albeit inconsistent, has been observed in school-age children, but when use of a computational shortcut based on inversion emerges and how awareness of the…