Abstract
The most common characteristic of children with mathematical disorders is a difficulty in retrieving basic arithmetic facts. Different hypotheses about the underlying cause and the specificity of this deficit have been postulated. Some of them are general (such as low speed-of-processing or difficulties in retrieving semantic information from longterm memory), others are more specific (such as problems with material requiring verbal routines or a deficit in representing or accessing arithmetic facts). To clarify this, children with poor arithmetic facts abilities (PoorAF) and control children of the same age performed five computerized tasks requiring the retrieval of information from long-term memory such as the product of multiplication facts, words semantically related to a target, objects functionally associated with a target, countries corresponding to a capital city presented as target, and the final word of incomplete French proverbs. In addition, a perceptual task was used as a measure of children’s processing speed. It was found that children with PoorAF were significantly slower than control children only in the arithmetic retrieval task. These findings support the hypothesis of a specific numerical deficit altering the retrieval of the arithmetic network from long-term memory.
Highlights
There have been a large number of studies of learning disorders in mathematics in the last ten years
The error rate for each task was calculated for every participant separately, and entered into a mixed ANCOVA with group as the between-subjects factor, tasks as the withinsubjects factors, and LUM scores as the covariate
In an analyses of variance (ANOVA) with problem size and group, the results indicated a main effect of problem size, (F(1, 34) = 7.531, p = .01), indicating higher error rates for medium multiplication facts (8.3%) than for small multiplication facts (4.7%)
Summary
There have been a large number of studies of learning disorders in mathematics in the last ten years. Children with mathematical disorders (MD) tend to display heterogeneous patterns of numerical skills [5,6,7], but the most consistent finding is their difficulty with simple calculations. In those situations, they produce more errors and their reaction time pattern differs from that of younger children without a learning deficit [810]. They produce more errors and their reaction time pattern differs from that of younger children without a learning deficit [810] This profile is mainly due to their difficulties in retrieving basic arithmetic facts from long-term memory [11,12,13,14,15,16,17]. For most children with MD, the ability to retrieve basic facts does not substantively improve during the elementary-school years, suggesting that the retrieval difficulties result from a persistent cognitive deficit, rather than delayed development [13]
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