Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA; Department of Psychology, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL 33620, USA; Jiann-Ping Hsu College of Public Health, Georgia Southern University, Statesboro, GA 30458, USA.
Department of Psychology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA.
J Exp Child Psychol. 2019 Nov;187:104651. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2019.06.004. Epub 2019 Jul 25.
The current study examined the relations between 5- and 6-year-olds' understanding of ordinality and their mathematical competence. We focused specifically on "positional operations," a property of ordinality not contingent on magnitude, in an effort to better understand the unique contributions of position-based ordinality to math development. Our findings revealed that two types of positional operations-the ability to execute representational movement along letter sequences and the ability to update ordinal positions after item insertion or removal-predicted children's arithmetic performance. Nevertheless, these positional operations did not mediate the relation between magnitude processing (as measured by the acuity of the approximate number system) and arithmetic performance. Taken together, these findings suggest a unique role for positional ordinality in math development. We suggest that positional ordinality may aid children in their mental organization of number symbols, which may facilitate solving arithmetic computations and may support the development of novel numerical concepts.
本研究考察了 5 至 6 岁儿童对顺序性的理解与其数学能力之间的关系。我们特别关注“位置操作”，这是一种不依赖于大小的顺序性属性，旨在更好地理解基于位置的顺序性对数学发展的独特贡献。我们的发现表明，两种类型的位置操作——沿着字母序列执行表示性运动的能力和在插入或移除项目后更新顺序位置的能力——预测了儿童的算术表现。然而，这些位置操作并没有中介大小处理（通过近似数量系统的锐度来衡量）与算术表现之间的关系。综上所述，这些发现表明位置顺序性在数学发展中具有独特的作用。我们认为，位置顺序性可能有助于儿童对数字符号进行心理组织，这可能有助于解决算术运算，并支持新的数字概念的发展。
