Abstract
Although most deaf individuals could use sign language or sign/spoken language mix, hearing loss would still affect their language acquisition. Compensatory plasticity holds that the lack of auditory stimulation experienced by deaf individuals, such as congenital deafness, can be met by enhancements in visual cognition. And the studies of hearing individuals have showed that visual form perception is the cognitive mechanism that could explain the association between numerical magnitude processing and arithmetic computation. Therefore, we examined numerical magnitude processing and its contribution to arithmetical ability in deaf adolescents, and explored the differences between the congenital and acquired deafness. 112 deaf adolescents (58 congenital deafness) and 58 hearing adolescents performed a series of cognitive and mathematical tests, and it was found there was no significant differences between the congenital group and the hearing group, but congenital group outperformed acquired group in numerical magnitude processing (reaction time) and arithmetic computation. It was also found there was a close association between numerical magnitude processing and arithmetic computation in all deaf adolescents, and after controlling for the demographic variables (age, gender, onset of hearing loss) and general cognitive abilities (non-verbal IQ, processing speed, reading comprehension), numerical magnitude processing could predict arithmetic computation in all deaf adolescents but not in congenital group. The role of numerical magnitude processing (symbolic and non-symbolic) in deaf adolescents' mathematical performance should be paid attention in the training of arithmetical ability.
Highlights
Mathematical knowledge and ability play an important role in the successes of our social life (Ritchie and Bates, 2013), but most deaf individuals have some difficulty in acquisition of arithmetical skills even if they have the approximately same level of nonverbal intelligence as hearing peers (Braden, 1994; Moreno, 2000)
We found a significant group effect on reading comprehension, arithmetic computation, symbolic magnitude comparison, and the accuracy of non-symbolic magnitude comparison but not on the reaction time of nonsymbolic magnitude comparison
Consistent with the previous results, the study shows the worse performance on symbolic but not non-symbolic magnitude processing in deaf adolescents, which indicates that the lag of mathematics in deaf individuals may be due to the delay of symbolic but not non-symbolic encoding
Summary
Mathematical knowledge and ability play an important role in the successes of our social life (Ritchie and Bates, 2013), but most deaf individuals have some difficulty in acquisition of arithmetical skills even if they have the approximately same level of nonverbal intelligence as hearing peers (Braden, 1994; Moreno, 2000). Mathematical Cognition of Congenital Deafness (LeFevre et al, 2010; De Smedt et al, 2013; Sasanguie et al, 2013; Fazio et al, 2014; Linsen et al, 2015), few studies on the arithmetical abilities of deaf individuals (Masataka, 2006; Andin et al, 2014, 2020). Dehaene and Cohen (1995, 1997) proposed two major transcoding paths between the three representational codes: a direct a semantic route that transcodes written numerals to auditory verbal to guide retrieval of rote knowledge of arithmetic facts without semantic mediation, and an indirect semantic route specialized for quantitative processing that manipulates analog magnitude representations by manipulating visual Arabic representations. Neuropsychological studies found some patients demonstrated impairment in tasks involving verbal representations of number, but could perform tasks involving non-verbal representations of number (Cipolotti and Butterworth, 1995; Cohen et al, 2000)
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