Contributions of linguistic, quantitative, and spatial attention skills to young children's math versus reading: Same, different, or both?

Abstract

The study used Bayesian and Frequentist methods to investigate whether the roles of linguistic, quantitative, and spatial attention skills are distinct in children's acquisition of reading and math. A sample of 175 Chinese kindergarteners was tested with measures of linguistic skills (phonological awareness and phonological memory), quantitative knowledge (number line task, symbolic digit comparison, and non‐symbolic number estimation), spatial attention skills (visual span, mental rotation, and visual search), word reading, and calculation. After statistically controlling for age and nonverbal intelligence, phonological awareness and digit comparison performance explained unique variance in both math and reading. Moreover, number line estimation was specifically important for math, while phonological memory was specifically essential for reading. These findings highlight the possibility of developing early screening tools with different cognitive measures for children at risk of learning disabilities in reading and/or math.

Early Predictors of Mathematical Competencies Development from Infancy to Preschool Age: A Systematic Review on Longitudinal Effects

“…However, the results for mathematical domains, such as ANS acuity, are also mixed (e.g., K. Liu et al 2023;Silver et al 2020), leading to the assumption that other factors might influence those relations.…”

The relation between number line performance and mathematics outcomes: Two meta‐analyses

“…Accurately placing whole numbers and fractions on a physical number line is a commonly used measure of students’ understanding of numerical magnitude (e.g., Clarke et al., 2020; Hansen, 2015; Hawes et al., 2019; Hornung et al., 2014; Luwel et al., 2019; Morsanyi et al., 2020; Peeters et al., 2015), and performance on such measures is consistently related to overall mathematics achievement and various specific mathematics outcomes, both concurrently and longitudinally (Booth & Siegler, 2006; Clarke et al., 2020; Geary et al., 2008; Hansen et al., 2017; Liu et al., 2022; Scofield et al., 2021; Zhu et al., 2017). An earlier meta‐analysis estimated the relation between number line performance and overall mathematical ability was r = 0.44, and the strength of the association was similar across different mathematics domains (Schneider et al., 2018).…”