The main purpose of our study was to understand whether, and in what ways, verbal and non-verbal numerical knowledge were integrated in a group of CI preschoolchildren. Our aim was two-fold. First, we wanted to investigate whether the numerical knowledge of the 4–5-year-old CI preschoolers in this study was comparable to that of their hearing peers. A second aim was to understand whether early nonverbal and verbal numerical skills were integrated in their numerical knowledge before the start of formal mathematical instruction.The study confirmed that, despite their early auditory deprivation and initial difficulty in accessing verbal language, CI children may perform well in numerical tasks that require visuo-spatial analysis (i.e. analogical comparison tasks).One of the most interesting results of the present study is that the CI children in this study performed as well as HC in digit comparisons. It is also interesting that verbal counting did not differ in the two groups. Our results seem to suggest the opposite: the encoding of the numerical semantic representation seems to be relatively good for the CI children in our study. It is the integration between this ability and their verbal counting skills to be not yet complete at this age. Counting helps the child compare digits when his/her ability to access the corresponding magnitude representation is not yet perfectly efficient. This apparently happened in the control group, but not in the CI group. What happens in the hearing child, who soon appears to integrate verbal and non-verbal numerical skills in a coherent cognitive numerical system, seemed not to happen easily in the CI children in this study. In the near future, researchers and educators might be able to explain how this happens or how it can be stimulated.
Analogic and Symbolic Comparison of Numerosity in Preschool Children with Cochlear Implants
TREVISI, Patrizia;
2011
Abstract
The main purpose of our study was to understand whether, and in what ways, verbal and non-verbal numerical knowledge were integrated in a group of CI preschoolchildren. Our aim was two-fold. First, we wanted to investigate whether the numerical knowledge of the 4–5-year-old CI preschoolers in this study was comparable to that of their hearing peers. A second aim was to understand whether early nonverbal and verbal numerical skills were integrated in their numerical knowledge before the start of formal mathematical instruction.The study confirmed that, despite their early auditory deprivation and initial difficulty in accessing verbal language, CI children may perform well in numerical tasks that require visuo-spatial analysis (i.e. analogical comparison tasks).One of the most interesting results of the present study is that the CI children in this study performed as well as HC in digit comparisons. It is also interesting that verbal counting did not differ in the two groups. Our results seem to suggest the opposite: the encoding of the numerical semantic representation seems to be relatively good for the CI children in our study. It is the integration between this ability and their verbal counting skills to be not yet complete at this age. Counting helps the child compare digits when his/her ability to access the corresponding magnitude representation is not yet perfectly efficient. This apparently happened in the control group, but not in the CI group. What happens in the hearing child, who soon appears to integrate verbal and non-verbal numerical skills in a coherent cognitive numerical system, seemed not to happen easily in the CI children in this study. In the near future, researchers and educators might be able to explain how this happens or how it can be stimulated.I documenti in SFERA sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
