The performance of young deaf children in spatial and temporal number tasks

Deaf children tend to fall behind in mathematics at school. This problem may be a direct result of particular experiences in the classroom; for example, deaf children may find it hard to follow teachers' presentations of basic, but nevertheless quite abstract, mathematical ideas. Another possibility is that the problem starts before school: They may either be worse than hearing children at early, nonlinguistic number representations, they may be behind in learning the culturally transmitted number string, or both. This may result in deaf children failing to develop informal problem-solving strategies, which prepare most children for the more formal learning of number and arithmetic that they will have to do at school. We compared 3- and 4-year-old deaf and hearing children's ability to remember and to reproduce the number of items in a set of objects. In one condition, we presented all the items together in a spatial array; in another, we presented them one at a time in a temporal sequence. Deaf children performed as well as the hearing children in the temporal tasks, but outperformed their hearing counterparts in the spatial task. These results suggest that preschool deaf children's number representation is at least as advanced as that of hearing children, and that they are actually better than hearing children at representing the number of objects in spatial arrays. We conclude that deaf children's difficulties with mathematical learning are not a consequence of a delay in number representation. We also conclude that deaf children should benefit from mathematical instruction that emphasizes spatial representation.