Math Talk to Infants During Everyday Home Activities: Contextual Cues to Words About Number, Space, and Magnitude

ABSTRACT

Infants begin to produce abstract “math” words – such as numbers (e.g., “two”), spatial terms (e.g., “down”), and magnitude words (e.g., “more”) – during their second postnatal year. Math words, as all words, are likely learned in the home setting during interactions with caregivers. However, everyday early exposure to math talk is understudied. What referents and social cues accompany caregivers’ math-related speech to infants? We examined U.S. infants’ (25 girls, 25 boys; ages 13 to 23 months; 60% white non-Latine) exposure to math words at home during everyday activities with their mothers. We documented three types of math words/phrases (i.e., number, spatial, and magnitude words), their referents (e.g., images in books), and the social cues that accompanied math talk (e.g., gestures). Math words appeared in 15% of mothers’ utterances (13,000+ math utterances in aggregate), increased with child age, mostly specified spatial concepts (e.g., location and direction), and tended to refer to objects and actions in the environment that were relevant to the child, such as toys, books, and the child’s body and behaviors. Social cues accompanied mothers’ math talk about half the time. Notably, certain types of referents and social cues aligned with specific types of math talk (e.g., manual gestures such as points accompanied talk about spatial features such as shapes). In the everyday home environment, infants experience frequent and varied math words, across a variety of activities, in the presence of salient social and contextual cues.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Four additional categories of math-related language were coded but not included in this study of referents and social cues. These categories were time words (e.g., tomorrow, soon, daily), superordinates (e.g., number, size, distance), ordinals (e.g., next, after, once), and prompts (e.g., where, how much, count).

² Analysis of overall talk by age revealed a main effect of age: F(2, 47) = 3.59, p = .035; however, none of the post-hoc analyses of age-pairings were significant. Additionally, when including overall talk as a covariate (ANCOVA), both math talk category and age remained significant at p < .001. Therefore, we are cautious in interpreting overall language effects and focus on math-related language specifically.

³ The two main effects align with results reported in previous sections: F(7,1568) = 29.23, p < 0.001 and F(3,1568) = 138.94, p < 0.001, respectively.

⁴ Three referent categories had odds ratios that were above 1 but did not reach the threshold for a weak association or small effect: household objects and extrinsic spatial language (OR = 1.64), songs and number language (OR = 1.41), and the mother and extrinsic spatial language (OR = 1.52).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the LEGO Foundation: National Science Foundation [HRD1761053]; National Institutes of Child Health and Development [R01HD094830].