ASSESSING EARLY ARITHMETIC ABILITIES - EFFECTS OF VERBAL AND NONVERBAL RESPONSE TYPES ON THE CALCULATION PERFORMANCE OF MIDDLE-AND LOW-INCOME CHILDREN

In two studies, we compared young children's performance on three vari ations of a nonverbally presented calculation task. The experimental t asks used the same nonverbal mode of presentation but were varied acco rding to response type: (1) putting out disks (nonverbal production); (2) choosing the correct number of disks from a multiple-choice array (nonverbal recognition); and (3) giving a number word (verbal producti on). The verbal production task required children to map numerosities onto the conventional number system while the nonverbal production and nonverbal recognition tasks did not. Study 1 showed that the performa nce of 3-, 4- and 5-year-old middle-income children (N = 72) did not v ary with the type of response required. Children's answers to nonverba lly presented addition and subtraction problems were available in both verbal and nonverbal forms. In contrast, Study 2 showed that low-inco me children (3- and 4-year-olds; N = 48) performed significantly bette r on both nonverbal response type tasks than on the verbal response ty pe task. Analysis of individual data indicated that a number of the lo w-income children were successful on the completely nonverbal calculat ion tasks, even though they had difficulty with verbal counting (i.e., set enumeration and cardinality). The findings suggest that the abili ty to calculate does not depend on mastery of conventional symbols of arithmetic.