@article{Representations:1471,
      recid = {1471},
      author = {Gibson, Dominic James},
      title = {Gesture’s Role in Bridging Symbolic and Nonsymbolic  Representations of Number},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2017-08},
      pages = {133},
      abstract = {How do children transition from preverbal conceptions of  numerical quantity to a full understanding of symbolic  number (e.g. number words: one, two, three. etc.)? This is  an important question in developmental psychology with  serious implications for early childhood education. A  surprisingly unspecified aspect of early number development  is children’s use of cardinal number gestures (e.g. holding  up three fingers to indicate “three”). Although it is  widely assumed that number gestures play some role in  children’s early number development (e.g. Gelman &  Gallistel, 1978; Fuson, 1988), the specifics of this role  are not well understood. In three studies, I establish the  relevance of number gestures to the acquisition of number  words and examine children’s knowledge of number gestures  in relation to their developing understanding of number  words. 

Study 1 examined cases in which children’s number  gestures do not match their spoken number words when  labeling sets of items (e.g. a child holds up three fingers  and says “two” in reference to a set of three items). Not  only are children’s number gestures typically more accurate  than their speech during these gesture-speech mismatches,  children who produced gesture-speech mismatchers are more  likely to learn new number words from rich number input  than children who did not produce gesture-speech  mismatches. Studies 2 and 3 investigated whether children  appreciate the symbolic properties of number gestures.  Specifically, Study 2 found that children form precise  mappings between number gestures and number words, even  before demonstrating a comprehension of number words on  traditional number measures. Study 3 found that children  conceive of at least some number gestures as number symbols  (like number words) and not merely item-based  representations of number (such as arrays of dots). The  results of these three studies combined with previous  research suggest that number gestures could serve as a  bridge between nonsymbolic and symbolic representations of  number.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/1471},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.1471},
}