Title Page What’s in a question? Parents’ question use in dyadic interactions and the relation to preschool-aged children’s math abilities

The cognitive complexity of adults’ questions, particularly during shared book reading, supports children’s developing language skills. Questions can be described as having low cognitive demand (e.g., labeling, matching) or high cognitive demand (e.g., comparing, predicting). Little is known about the relation between different types of parental questioning and children’s math abilities. The present study examines the quantity of low- and high-cognitive demand (CD) and domain-specific math questions that parents pose to their 4-year-old children in three structured activities, and how the frequency of those questions relates to children’s concurrent math and language skills. Parent-child dyads (n=121) were observed interacting with a picture book, grocery store toys, and a puzzle for about 5 minutes each and children completed math and spatial assessments. Although the frequency with which parents asked questions did not relate to children’s outcomes, parents’ use of high-CD questions was associated with children’s spatial skills, standardized math scores, and vocabulary skills after controlling for parental utterances, child utterances, child age, and family socioeconomic status. However, domain-specific math questions were not related to any child outcomes above and beyond parents’ total questions. This study suggests that domain-general questions that vary in cognitive demand (low and high) are differentially related to children’s math and language abilities, which can inform the ways parents engage in early learning opportunities with their children

Processing of numerical and proportional quantifiers

Quantifier expressions like “many” and “at least” are part of a rich repository of words in language representing magnitude information. The role of numerical processing in comprehending quantifiers was studied in a semantic truth value judgment task, asking adults to quickly verify sentences about visual displays using numerical (at least seven, at least thirteen, at most seven, at most thirteen) or proportional (many, few) quantifiers. The visual displays were composed of systematically varied proportions of yellow and blue circles. The results demonstrated that numerical estimation and numerical reference information are fundamental in encoding the meaning of quantifiers in terms of response times and acceptability judgments. However, a difference emerges in the comparison strategies when a fixed external reference numerosity (seven or thirteen) is used for numerical quantifiers, whereas an internal numerical criterion is invoked for proportional quantifiers. Moreover, for both quantifier types, quantifier semantics and its polarity (positive vs. negative) biased the response direction (accept/reject). Overall, our results indicate that quantifier comprehension involves core numerical and lexical semantic properties, demonstrating integrated processing of language and numbers