Relationship between multimodal parental input and mathematical skills of preschoolers

Date

2026-1-8

Author

Yalçınkaya, Tuğçe

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Mathematical skills are crucial domains of children’s development, and parental input supports this development through activities, such as play and book reading. Gestures may further enrich this input by providing multimodal support. In this study, we adopted a comprehensive approach to examine whether parental math input during book reading is related to parents’ own tendency to provide math input, the extent to which the book reading materials cue parents to produce math input, and preschool-aged children’s mathematical skills. Mother–child dyads (N = 73) engaged in a semi-structured play session and a book reading session that included one of the three conditions (fingers, dots, neutral). Parental speech-only and multimodal inputs were coded in both contexts, and children’s mathematical skills in multiple domains. Parental math input did not differ across dyads during the play session, which preceded random assignment to book reading conditions. In contrast, parental input differed systematically across book reading conditions: parents provided more speech-only math input when reading the dots book and more multimodal math input when reading the fingers book compared to the neutral book. Multimodal math input during play significantly predicted multimodal input during book reading, indicating stability in parents’ use of gestures across activities. Children’s mathematical performance was largely unrelated to parental input, with the exception of symbolic comparison skill in large distance trials, which was associated with multimodal input. Overall, parental math input appears to be shaped primarily by contextual cues and parents’ own input tendencies rather than by children’s mathematical skill levels.

Subject Keywords

Mathematical skills, Parental input, Gestures, Book reading, Semi-structured play

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/118306

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis