How does multilingualism interact with early number concepts?

This study explores the impact of multilingualism on early number concepts in preschool children. We compared the performance of mono- and multilingual preschoolers on four tasks that test early number concepts. The tasks were counting, Give-N, magnitude judgements, and number identification. The sample included 59 Australian children aged 3.5 to 5.5 years, with 25 multilingual children exposed to at least one language in addition to English. Our results indicated that age was a significant predictor across all tasks, and mono- versus multilingual experience alone did not have a substantial effect on these tasks. However, there was a significant age-by-language experience interaction in the counting task, where older multilingual children counted significantly higher than the older monolinguals. These findings lend new insights into the nuanced role that multilingualism plays in the development of number concepts.