Language-specific numerical estimation in bilingual children

We tested 5- to 7-year-old bilingual learners of French and English (N = 91) to investigate how language-specific knowledge of verbal numerals affects numerical estimation. Participants made verbal estimates for rapidly presented random dot arrays in each of their two languages. Estimation accuracy differed across children’s two languages, an effect which remained when controlling for children’s familiarity with number words across their two languages. Also, children’s estimates were equivalently well ordered in their two languages, suggesting that differences in accuracy were due to how children represented the relative distance between number words in each language. Overall, these results suggest that bilingual children have different mappings between their verbal and non-verbal counting systems across their two languages and that those differences in mappings are likely driven by an asymmetry in their knowledge of the structure of the count list across their languages. Implications for bilingual math education are discussed.