The effect of phonological processing on mathematics performance in elementary school varies for boys and girls: Fixed‐effects longitudinal analysis

Abstract

Investigations into the relations between phonological processing and math performance have yielded contradictory results. These contradictions might be related to small sample sizes and/or cross‐sectional designs of previous studies that limited the possibility of generalizing the findings obtained. The first goal of this study was to estimate the effect of phonological processing on number recognition and math performance during the first year of schooling, controlling for reading achievement. The second goal was to examine whether this effect varied for boys and girls. To achieve these goals, we used a large sample of first‐graders (N = 3296, 49% were girls) in Russia and applied fixed effects longitudinal analysis. Participants were assessed twice, at the beginning and at the end of the first grade (mean age was 7.3 years at Time 1). The item response theory scaling procedure was used to estimate individual scores for math performance, number recognition, phonological processing and reading performance. The results revealed that phonological processing had effects on number recognition and math performance. This effect was more salient for number recognition than for math performance, probably due to the greater involvement of the retrieval strategy in number recognition tasks. The results also demonstrated that the effect of phonological processing on number recognition was stronger for girls than for boys.

Bidirectional Relationships between Phonological Processing and Basic Number Knowledge in Kindergarten Children: A Longitudinal Study

“…Phonological processing refers to the ability to use phonological information to decode linguistic information (Wagner & Torgesen, 1987;Kuzmina et al, 2019). Phonological processing includes three main components: phonological awareness, rapid automatic naming (hereafter, RAN) and phonological memory (Lu, 2003;Wagner & Torgesen, 1987).…”

The Precision of Symbolic Numerical Representation in Verbal Format has an Indirect Effect on Math Performance in First Grade

“…The current study aims to fill this gap, examining the relationship between math performance and the precision of symbolic representation in both visual and verbal formats. We estimate these relationships at the end of first grade, controlling for prior math performance and other well-established predictors of math performance, such as working memory (Peng et al, 2016), phonological awareness (Kuzmina et al, 2019;Lopes-Silva et al, 2014;Simmons & Singleton, 2008), reading skills (Jordon et al, 2002) and the precision of nonsymbolic magnitude representation (Chen & Li, 2014). Based on previous findings with number words in audio format, we expect that there is a positive association between the precision of symbolic representation in verbal format and math performance, or that the association might be indirect via digits due to the necessity to transcode the verbal format into the visual before all numerical operations.…”