Numerical abilities in a group of young preterm children

By Catherine Thevenot, Guy Chazoule, Sandrine Masson, Caroline Castel, Michel Fayol
English

Difficulties in mathematics are often reported in the literature on preterm children. However, it is unknown whether these difficulties stem from general cognitive capacity deficiencies or from specific and primary numerical ability impairments. In order to shed light on this matter, we assessed preterm and control children on their intelligence, language skills, and processing speed as well as on their performance in numerical symbolic (number words and digits) and non-symbolic comparison (object collections) tasks. Our results reveal specific difficulties for five-year-old preterm children in the production of the verbal number sequence. Moreover, preterm children show greater distance effects in numerical comparison tasks, which suggests that, as children with dyscalculia, they present a severe number sense deficiency.

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