Date of Completion

Spring 5-1-2021

Thesis Advisor(s)

Marie Coppola

Honors Major

Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences

Second Honors Major

Cognitive Science

Disciplines

Developmental Psychology | Psychology

Abstract

Children with less-developed number representations may use more externalized counting behaviors (Posid & Cordes, 2015). We assessed the impact of the timing of language exposure (from birth/later) and language modality (signed/spoken) on children’s mapping performance, or ability to link three number representations (e.g., dot arrays, number words, Arabic numerals), and children’s use of spontaneous counting during this task. With 48 hearing and 142 deaf or hard-of-hearing children ages 4-9 years, we investigated three research questions: (1) How do the timing and modality of children’s language exposure impact their use of spontaneous counting?; (2) How does children’s use of spontaneous counting affect their performance on the mapping task; and (3) How does the use of spontaneous counting developmentally progress? We found that children who are exposed later to language used spontaneous counting more than early-exposed children, while language modality did not have an effect. The use of spontaneous counting did not predict children’s performance on the mapping task. Finally, early-exposed children use spontaneous counting more at younger ages but not as much at older ages, while later-exposed children continue to engage in counting behavior even at older ages. Spontaneous counting had low occurrences overall, so future research may need increased variability or quantities beyond 9 to corroborate the results of this study. In the occurrences of spontaneous counting we did observe, later-exposed children used spontaneous counting more frequently, and later in development, than did early-exposed children. One interpretation of this difference is that it may reflect less confidence and less developed mathematical skills in the later-exposed children. These results highlight the importance of early language exposure for typical development of mathematical skills, as well as the need for training teachers in the trajectory of these skills.

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