Abstract
Though previous findings report that hearing impaired children exhibit impaired language and arithmetic skills, our current understanding of how hearing and the associated language impairments may influence the development of arithmetic skills is still limited. In the current study numerical/arithmetic performance of 45 children with a cochlea implant were compared to that of controls matched for hearing age, intelligence and sex. Our main results were twofold disclosing that children with CI show general as well as specific numerical/arithmetic impairments. On the one hand, we found an increased percentage of children with CI with an indication of dyscalculia symptoms, a general slowing in multiplication and subtraction as well as less accurate number line estimations. On the other hand, however, children with CI exhibited very circumscribed difficulties associated with place-value processing. Performance declined specifically when subtraction required a borrow procedure and number line estimation required the integration of units, tens, and hundreds instead of only units and tens. Thus, it seems that despite initially atypical language development, children with CI are able to acquire arithmetic skills in a qualitatively similar fashion as their normal hearing peers. Nonetheless, when demands on place-value understanding, which has only recently been proposed to be language mediated, hearing impaired children experience specific difficulties.
Highlights
At first glance, skills like mental arithmetic and/or magnitude comparison are not readily dependent on language abilities
We found an increased percentage of children with cochlear implant (CI) with an indication of dyscalculia symptoms, a general slowing in multiplication and subtraction as well as less accurate number line estimations
Taken together, our results disclose that children with CI
Summary
Skills like mental arithmetic and/or magnitude comparison are not readily dependent on language abilities. The developmental trajectories, seem to be deviant from typical with respect to phonetics and phonology and delayed with respect to grammar and lexicon (e.g., Blarney et al, 2001; Chin, 2006; Leyrer, 2008; Adi-Bensaid and Tubul-Lacy, 2009; Geers et al, 2009; Friedmann and Szterman, 2011). Such variability in developmental pathways of linguistic skills might affect other cognitive domains such as numerical cognition. Before presenting the experimental study the interrelation of numerical and language skills will be elaborated on briefly
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