The real preschoolers of Orange County: Early number learning in a diverse group of children

Abstract

The authors assessed a battery of number skills in a sample of over 500 preschoolers, including bothmonolingual 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 describe entailment relations among numeracy skills: Findings indicatedthat transitive and intransitive counting were jointly required for understanding cardinality; that cardinalityand knowledge of written number symbols were both required for using number lines. The study’s secondgoal was to describe relations between symbolic numeracy and language context (i.e., monolingual vs.bilingual contexts), separating these from well-documented socio-economic influences such as householdincome and parental education: Language context had only a modest effect on numeracy, with nodifferences detectable on most tasks. However, a difference did appear on the scaffolded number-line task,where bilingual learners performed slightly better than monolinguals. The third goal of the study was to findout whether symbolic number knowledge for one subset of children (Spanish/English bilingual learnersfrom low-income households) differed when tested in their home language (Spanish) vs. their language ofpreschool instruction (English): Findings indicated that children performed as well or better in English thanin Spanish for all measures, even when their receptive vocabulary scores in Spanish were higher than inEnglish.