Cultural Constructions of Parent–Child Spatial Interactions

Cultural influences, such as a language’s reading direction and parents’ everyday interactions, can impact a child’s asymmetric mapping of information to the left and right sides of space. To determine the ways parents transmit these spatial associations to their children, we presented three -to-five-year-old parent–child dyads in both America and Israel with a cooperative task to co-construct the first six numbers, letters of the alphabet, or colors of the rainbow. We then measured the direction in which the children placed the stimuli, the extent to which the parents guided the children (direct interactions with the stimuli, pointing, and the number of conventional phrases) to encourage them during the task, and the children’s numeracy. There were three main findings. By four years of age, American children—but not Israeli children—exhibit culturally consistent spatial structuring of layouts for all types of stimuli when working with their parents on the task. Parents emphasized conventionality (through language, gesturing, and helping the children place the chips in a certain way) more for stimuli that are typically very ordered (like numbers and letters) than stimuli that are not (like colors). Children’s general numeracy was related to the extent that they structured the number stimuli from left to right. Together, these findings detail how caregivers’ informal and spontaneous interactions around directional conventions are specific to particular ordinal contexts, and the importance of these conventions of directionality in children’s numeracy development.