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.…

Studies on children's understanding of counting examine when and how children acquire the cardinal principle: the idea that the last word in a counted set reflects the cardinal value of the set. Using Wynn's (1990) Give-N Task, researchers classify children who can count to generate large sets as having acquired the cardinal principle…

Children vary widely in their number knowledge by the time they enter kindergarten, and this variation is related to their future academic success. Although talk about number predicts children's early understanding of foundational number concepts, we know little about whether interventions can increase this talk nor about the types of number talk…

As adults, we represent and think about number, space, and time in at least two ways: our intuitive--but imprecise--perceptual representations, and the slowly learned--but precise--number words. With development, these representational formats interface, allowing us to use precise number words to estimate imprecise perceptual experiences. We test…

Impaired numerosity perception in developmental dyscalculia (low "number acuity") has been interpreted as evidence of reduced representational precision in the neurocognitive system supporting non-symbolic number sense. However, recent studies suggest that poor numerosity judgments might stem from stronger interference from non-numerical…

The development of young children's counting has been extensively researched, yet detailed studies that examine development over multiple years are curiously absent from the literature. This research examined 15 preschoolers' (ages 3-4) use of number words as they engaged in two counting tasks, an oral counting task and counting a collection of 31…

In the literature on numerical cognition, the presence of the capacity to distinguish between numerosities by attending to the number of items, rather than continuous properties of stimuli that correlate with it, is commonly taken as sufficient indication of numerical abilities in cognitive agents. However, this literature does not take into…

Mastery of the cardinality principle (CP) is foundational for children's mathematical development. Children's age and subitizing and counting skills contribute to their CP acquisition. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of different types of instruction for supporting 3-4-year-olds' CP development and its interplay with child…

One model of numeric perception is a density-area mechanism: a process that estimates both density and area of an array, then multiplies them to create an estimate of number. One line of evidence that supports this is the surprising numeric Ebbinghaus illusion: smaller context circles lead to greater perceived number than larger context circles,…

Number-recognition tasks, such as the how-many task, involve set-to-word mapping, and number-creation tasks, such as the give-n task, entail word-to-set mapping. The present study involved comparing sixty 3-year-olds' performance on the two tasks with collections of one to three items over three time points about 3 weeks apart. Inconsistent with…

In two studies, we investigated whether using three-dimensional (3D) manipulatives during assessment aided performance on a variety of preschool mathematics tasks compared to pictorial representations. On measures of children's understanding of counting and cardinality (n = 103), there was no difference in performance between manipulatives and…

Research Findings: This study examined age-based developmental trajectories of four key number sense (NS) skills within an accelerated longitudinal design. Using data from 408 preschoolers, ages 45 to 68 months, linear and latent basis growth curves were evaluated. Results indicated growth across NS skills was best represented as nonlinear for all…

Children's early accuracy on place value (PV) tasks longitudinally predicts their later multidigit calculation skills. However, another window into children's emerging base-ten concepts is the pattern of errors -- "smart errors" -- they exhibit on these measures. Past research has speculated that these smart errors -- similar to invented…

The authors assessed a battery of number skills in a sample of over 500 preschoolers, including both monolingual and bilingual/ multilingual learners from households at a range of socio-economic levels. Receptive vocabulary was measured in English for all children, and also in Spanish for those who spoke it. The first goal of the study was to…

Teacher quality in primary schools in South Africa is a serious concern, and how best to prepare teachers in initial teacher education--with regard to mathematics--remains an open and vexing question. There is a confluence of challenges facing the mathematics education community in South Africa: poor conceptual understanding of mathematics amongst…