Working memory and access to numerical information in children with disability in mathematics

The relationship among working memory, mathematic ability, and the cognitive impairment of children with difficulties in mathematics was examined. A group of children with difficulties in mathematics (MD) was compared with a group of children with a normal level of achievement matched for vocabulary, age, and gender (N = 49). The children were required to perform a variety of working memory and short-term memory tasks that had been administered 1 year previously. Moreover, the children were asked to perform tasks designed to provide information about speed of articulation. The results suggest a general working memory deficit in children with MD, specifically in the central executive component of Baddeley's model and primarily in the ability to inhibit irrelevant information. However, the MD children were not impaired in speech rate and counting speed tasks, which mainly involve the role of the articulatory loop.