The Development of Subitizing in Bilingual Children

What role does language-specific experience play in the development of numerical knowledge? Previous studies have probed this question by testing bilingual learners, who have different linguistic representations of number across their two languages. Here, we take this approach to study the effect of language-specific experience on children’s ability to rapidly estimate small sets (i.e., subitizing). We tested 66 Spanish-English and German-English bilinguals, aged 3 to 6, and found that bilinguals made more accurate verbal estimates of small sets in their dominant number language (i.e., the language in which they could count the highest). This was despite the fact that all children in the study were able to accurately count much larger sets, and were therefore classified as “cardinal principle knowers” in both of their two languages. These results provide evidence for early emerging individual differences in estimation abilities that are due to linguistic experience. Also, they suggest that even after children have begun to learn more advanced skills (e.g., accurate counting of large sets), individual differences in earlier learned skills (e.g., subitizing of small sets) may persist. Different language-specific experiences may therefore impose persistent effects on numerical development, with implications not only for bilingual learners, but also for monolinguals with impoverished exposure to number language.