How Bilingual Parents Talk to Children About Number in Mandarin and English

Number-related language input has been shown to influence children's number word acquisition and mathematical ability. Significant differences exist between how Mandarin Chinese speaking parents and monolingual English-speaking parents use numeric language in speech to children. In particular,...

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Published inFrontiers in psychology Vol. 10; p. 1090
Main Authors Chang, Alicia, Sandhofer, Catherine M
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Switzerland Frontiers Media S.A 14.05.2019
Subjects
bilingual
cardinality
children
language input
number words
Psychology
language input
bilingual
number words
children
cardinality
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Summary:Number-related language input has been shown to influence children's number word acquisition and mathematical ability. Significant differences exist between how Mandarin Chinese speaking parents and monolingual English-speaking parents use numeric language in speech to children. In particular, Mandarin Chinese speaking parents use cardinal number much more frequently in speech to children than do English speaking parents. However, because previous studies have been conducted cross-nationally, research has been unable to disentangle the influences of language from parental influence. The current study examined numeric language input to preschool children with bilingual Mandarin-English American parents. Results show that when parents speak to their children in Mandarin Chinese, children hear more instances and examples of the cardinal number principle than when parents speak to their children in English. This suggests that differences between how the Mandarin Chinese and English languages are structured leads to disparities in how frequently children hear cardinal number in everyday speech.
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Reviewed by: Ting-Ting Chang, National Chengchi University, Taiwan; Kristy VanMarle, University of Missouri, United States; You-jung Choi, Harvard University, United States
This article was submitted to Developmental Psychology, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
Edited by: Huei-Mei Liu, National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan
ISSN:1664-1078
1664-1078
DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2019.01090