The Performance of Young Deaf Children in Spatial and Temporal Number Tasks Yael Zarfaty University of Oxford Terezinha Nunes Oxford Brookes University Peter Bryant University of Oxford 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 num- ber 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 counter- parts 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. Introduction There is a great deal of evidence that children begin to grasp mathematical concepts long before they go to school. For example, preschool children can discrim- inate different sets of objects on the basis of their number and can reproduce a set of objects with the same number as the one that they have just been shown (Mix, Huttenlocher, & Levine, 2002; Saxe, Guberman, & Gearhart, 1987). It is also clear that the under- standing of number that children acquire through informal learning before they go to school plays an essential role in their learning about mathematics when they begin to receive formal instruction about mathematics at school (Mix et al., 2002; Nunes and Bryant, 1996). However, very little indeed is known about pre- school mathematical understanding in deaf children. There is evidence about deaf children’s progress in mathematics at school, and most of this suggests that mathematics does not come easily to the deaf schoolchild. This raises questions about the preschool period. Can the origins of deaf children’s mathematical difficulties be traced to the preschool period? Is their grasp of number already less advanced than that of hearing children even before they go to school? There are no empirical answers to these basic questions. The evidence about lower levels of mathematical success in deaf pupils in comparison with hearing pupils comes from studies across different countries, age levels, and cohorts. For example, in a mathematics We would like to thank the teachers and children from the Speech, Language, and Hearing Center, London, who generously gave their time, making this research possible. We are also grateful to the British Academy; Terezinha Nunes was supported during this time by a British Academy Research Readership. All correspondence should be sent to Professor Terezinha Nunes, Department of Psychology, Oxford Brookes University, Gipsy Lane, Oxford OX3 0BP, United Kingdom (e-mail: tnunes@brookes.ac.uk). Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education vol. 9 no. 3 Ó Oxford University Press 2004; all rights reserved. DOI: 10.1093/deafed/enh034 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jdsde/article/9/3/315/508598 by guest on 06 January 2022