Early number acquisition in bilingual children

Abstract

Children learn the first few number words one at a time, before learning the meaning of counting. Past research, however, has focused on monolingual children, with only a handful of studies on bi/multilingual children. The current study investigated whether knowledge of number words in one language predicted knowledge of those same number words in another language. We studied Mandarin-, Malay-, and Tamil-English bilingual children (N = 131, ages 2–5) growing up in Singapore, a multilingual and multicultural society, and found that their number knowledge was strongly correlated between languages. Contrary to previous studies in the U.S., we also found some evidence that meanings for small number words are transferred across languages. Our findings point to a possibility that early number words can be learned as translation equivalents (e.g., “one” in English is “yi” in Mandarin Chinese) in bilingual children and highlight the importance of taking an inclusive, global approach to studying numerical development that goes beyond studying White monolingual children.