Young children vary widely in the extent to which they attend to numerical information in their everyday environments without explicit prompting. This tendency to spontaneously focus on numerosity has been linked to children's math skills in past work. However, various measures have been used to quantify children's spontaneous focusing on numerosity (SFON) in previous studies, some of which rely on children's behavioral responses and others of which rely on verbal responses. Furthermore, these measures are not consistently related to one another or to children's math skills. In this study, we compared children's SFON as demonstrated through their behaviors and verbal responses during a set of imita-tion tasks in a sample of 107 3-and 4-year-olds. We found that children behaviorally demonstrate SFON (e.g., stamping the same number of spikes on a dinosaur as an experimenter) more fre-quently than they discuss number during the same tasks, but the two indices of SFON were significantly associated when accounting for variability in children's overall speech. Furthermore, we found that children's SFON through their actions was significantly pre-dicted by prior math skills, whereas SFON through speech was not.These findings indicate that SFON may be a multifaceted con-struct, although more work is needed to extend these findings to other common SFON tasks. (c) 2021 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Using data from 12 studies, we meta-analyze correlations between parent number talk during interactions with their young children (mean sample age ranging from 22 to 79 months) and two aspects of family socioeconomics, parent education, and family income. Potential variations in correlation sizes as a function of study characteristics were explored. Statistically significant positive correlations were found between the amount of number talk in parent-child interactions and both parent education and family income (i.e., r = 0.12 for education and 0.14 for income). Exploratory moderator analyses provided some preliminary evidence that child age, as well as the average level of and variability in socioeconomic status, may moderate effect sizes. The implications of these findings are discussed with special attention to interpreting the practical importance of the effect sizes in light of family strengths and debate surrounding word gaps.

Variability in children's early math skills may stem from differences in experienced math learning opportunities at home. Previous studies have quantified math-learning opportunities at home through engagement with math-related activities or exposure to number talk during parent-child conversations, but little is known about how specific activities relate to talk about math. The current study aims to explore how math activities and number talk occur at home and understand how these associations may vary across different types of families. Number talk was quantified for 97 parent-child dyads during in-lab and in-home play sessions. Results show that time spent in math-related activities during home observations was related to parent reports of math activities as well as parent number talk at home and in the lab. Interestingly, during non-math-related activities, we found that parents with higher education levels and parents of boys used more number talk than parents with lower education levels and parents of girls. During math-related activities, however, no such educational or gender differences were seen in number talk. These results highlight the importance of considering the contextual influences and constraints that affect children's opportunities for learning math, especially when designing interventions to increase math learning in families' homes. (C) 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Young children have better math abilities when their parents engage in more math-related conversations with them. Yet, previous studies have found that math talk occurs only very infrequently in everyday interactions. In the present study, we sought to promote adult-child conversations about math in a naturalistic context using minimal instructions. We observed 179 adult-child dyads while they shopped in grocery stores with signs prompting them to engage in math-related conversations (math condition), signs prompting them to talk about other topics (general language condition), or without any signs (baseline condition). In the math condition, more adults talked about math compared to the general language or the baseline condition, and this finding could not be explained by demographic characteristics of the dyad or the overall amount of conversations. This study demonstrates that cost-effective signs placed in everyday contexts can promote math-related conversations and potentially provide math learning opportunities for children.

Recent public discussions have suggested that the under-representation of women in science and mathematics careers can be traced back to intrinsic differences in aptitude. However, true gender differences are difficult to assess because sociocultural influences enter at an early point in childhood. If these claims of intrinsic differences are true, then gender differences in quantitative and mathematical abilities should emerge early in human development. We examined cross-sectional gender differences in mathematical cognition from over 500 children aged 6 months to 8 years by compiling data from five published studies with unpublished data from longitudinal records. We targeted three key milestones of numerical development: numerosity perception, culturally trained counting, and formal and informal elementary mathematics concepts. In addition to testing for statistical differences between boys' and girls' mean performance and variability, we also tested for statistical equivalence between boys' and girls' performance. Across all stages of numerical development, analyses consistently revealed that boys and girls do not differ in early quantitative and mathematical ability. These findings indicate that boys and girls are equally equipped to reason about mathematics during early childhood. Education: No gender differences in children's mathematicsGirls and boys show no cognitive differences in mathematical ability during infancy and early childhood across multiple tasks. To compare boys' and girls' early mathematical thinking, Alyssa Kersey and colleagues at the University of Rochester and University of Pittsburgh examined performance on three milestones of numerical development: numerosity sensitivity, counting range, and early mathematics achievement. Researchers tested not only for statistical differences between boys and girls but also statistical similarities. Across all aspects of early mathematics development, boys and girls exhibited no statistical differences and instead generally showed statistical equivalence. The results suggest that girls and boys begin development with an equivalent cognitive capacity for mathematics.

From birth, humans are able to discriminate quantities using the approximate number system (ANS). However, previous methods have only been suitable to examine ANS functioning in infancy and older children. The goals of this study were twofold: first, to modify an existing method of assessing ANS functioning for toddlerhood; and second, to investigate individual differences in toddlers' ANS performance by examining correlations with their parents' ANS acuity. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we found that 1-to 3-year-olds (N=46) looked significantly longer to numerically changing images compared to numerically constant ones suggesting that the paradigm is a suitable measure of ANS functioning in toddlerhood. Furthermore, we found a positive relation between toddlers' ANS performance and that of their parents (assessed using a non-symbolic number comparison task) independent of children's vocabulary or parents' perceived math ability or preference for math. These findings are consistent with a specific intergenerational transmission of the ANS.

Several studies suggest that parents' use of number words while talking with their children is positively related to children's understanding of certain mathematical concepts. In this study, we extended these findings and further examined several parent characteristics that could be related to individual differences in their number talk, including their subjective ratings of their math skills, preference for using math, beliefs about the importance of their children's math skills, and numerical approximation abilities, an early number skill present in children and adults. A sample of 44 5- and 6 -year-old children and their parents completed a variety of laboratory-based tasks, including a 10-min free play session to assess number talk, a standardized math assessment for children, a nonsymbolic numerical comparison task for parents, and several questionnaires for parents. Parents' overall number talk was not related to children's performance on the math assessment; however, parents' use of numbers larger than 10 was positively and significantly related to children's math abilities even when controlling for parents' overall talk. Parents' large number talk was also associated with their numerical approximation abilities and subjective math ability, suggesting that math-specific characteristics of parents themselves can explain some of the individual variability in parents' use of number words, especially those larger than 10. (C) 2017 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.