Subitizing and counting impairments in children with developmental coordination disorder

Developmental coordination disorder (DCD) interferes with academic achievement and daily life, and is associated with persistent academic difficulties, in particular within mathematical learning. In the present study, we aimed to study numerical cognition using an approach that taps very basic numerical processes such as subitizing and counting abilities in DCD. We used a counting task and a subitizing task in forty 7-10 years-old children with or without DCD. In both tasks, children were presented with arrays of one to eight dots and asked to name aloud the number of dots as accurately and quickly as possible. In the subitizing task, dots were presented during 250 ms whereas in the counting task they stayed on the screen until the participants gave a verbal response. The results showed that children with DCD were less accurate and slower in the two enumeration tasks (with and without a time limit), providing evidence that DCD impairs both counting and subitizing. These impairments might have a deleterious impact on the ability to improve the acuity of the Approximate Number System through counting, and thus could play a role in the underachievement of children with DCD in mathematics.