It is well established that early general language during preschool is critical for children's mathematical abilities. In an attempt to further characterize this association between language and mathematics, an increasing number of studies show that one specific type of language, namely mathematical language or the key linguistic concepts that are required for performing mathematical activities, is even more critical to children's mathematical abilities. The purpose of this systematic review is to summarize the evidence on mathematical language and mathematical abilities. We focus on preschool children as nearly all of the existing work has been done at this age. We first explain how mathematical language has been defined across studies, and report how it has been evaluated in studies in preschool. Next, we present the results of our systematic review. Following the PRISMA guidelines and after a critical appraisal, we ended with a set of 18 papers that were all of sufficient methodological quality. In these studies, mathematical language was defined as terms that are about numbers and operations on numbers (e.g., nine), but also included linguistic terms that do not directly refer to numbers, yet are important to understand mathematical concepts (i.e., quantitative and spatial terms such as fewest and middle, respectively). Some of these studies evaluated children's performance on mathematical language tasks, while others evaluated the mathematical language input provided to the child by their (educational) environment (teachers/parents/interventionists). Mathematical language correlated positively with children's mathematical abilities, concurrently and longitudinally. It also directly affected children's mathematical abilities, as was shown by intervention studies. We discuss potential directions for future research and highlight implications for education, arguing for more support for teachers and parents to improve the use of mathematical language in the classroom and in home settings.

众所周知，学龄前的早期通用语言对儿童的数学能力至关重要。为了进一步描述语言和数学之间的这种关联，越来越多的研究表明，一种特定类型的语言，即数学语言或进行数学活动所需的关键语言概念，对儿童的数学能力更为关键. 本系统评价的目的是总结有关数学语言和数学能力的证据。我们专注于学龄前儿童，因为几乎所有现有的工作都是在这个年龄段完成的。我们首先解释了数学语言是如何在各个研究中定义的，并报告它是如何在学龄前研究中被评估的。下一个，我们展示了我们系统审查的结果。遵循 PRISMA 指南并经过严格评估，我们以一组 18 篇论文结束，这些论文都具有足够的方法学质量。在这些研究中，数学语言被定义为关于数字和数字运算的术语（例如，九），但也包括不直接指代数字但对理解数学概念很重要的语言术语（即，数量和空间术语，例如最少和中间， 分别）。其中一些研究评估了儿童在数学语言任务上的表现，而另一些研究则评估了他们的（教育）环境（教师/父母/干预者）提供给孩子的数学语言输入。数学语言与儿童的数学能力呈正相关，同时和纵向。正如干预研究表明的那样，它还直接影响了儿童的数学能力。我们讨论未来研究的潜在方向并强调对教育的影响，主张为教师和家长提供更多支持，以改善数学语言在课堂和家庭环境中的使用。