| Popis: |
Learning the exact meaning of number words is an important yet difficult milestone in children’s mathematic development. A large body of work suggests that iconic number gestures (e.g., raising two fingers to indicate ‘two’) could play a role in supporting children’s mapping of number words to exact quantities. Children are adept at recognizing and using iconic number gestures in laboratory settings by age 3. However, it is unclear if this is reflective of children’s use of number gestures and/or observations of others using them during naturalistic interactions. Furthermore, the mechanism(s) by which such gestures benefit symbolic number learning are not well understood. In this dissertation I explore how children’s use of and exposure to iconic number gestures in both naturalistic and laboratory environments relates to their understanding and use of number words. Study 1 examines how and when children spontaneously use iconic number gestures in naturalistic interactions with their parents. I also examine whether parents’ and children’s use of these gestures are related, and whether usage of these gestures is related to children’s later cardinal number knowledge. Iconic number gestures are infrequent as compared to number words. When they are used, they most often accompany a number word, label cardinal sets rather than count items, refer to magnitudes of 1 and 2, and refer to non-visible entities. While parents’ and children’s iconic gesture use was related, we found no evidence that parents’ number gesture use impacted children’s later number word production nor their cardinal number knowledge at 46-months-of-age. Studies 2 and 3 propose that one mechanism by which parents’ iconic number gestures facilitate children’s cardinal number knowledge is by focusing children’s attention on numerical information. In both spontaneous interactions with their parents and in a controlled laboratory experiment, children who viewed an iconic number gesture together with a verbal number word provided more numerically relevant responses than children who heard a number word alone. Together the studies lend support to the theory that iconic number gestures help children map symbolic number words to quantities. |
