A Mechanistic Study of the Association Between Symbolic Approximate Arithmetic Performance and Basic Number Magnitude Processing Based on Task Difficulty

Abstract

Two types of number magnitude processing – semantic and spatial – are significantly correlated with children’s arithmetic performance. However, it remains unclear whether these abilities are independent predictors of symbolic approximate arithmetic performance. The current study addressed this question by assessing 86 kindergartners (mean age of 5 years and 7 months) on semantic number processing (number comparison task), spatial number processing (number line estimation task), and symbolic approximate arithmetic performance with different levels of difficulty. The results showed that performance on both tasks of number magnitude processing was significantly correlated with symbolic approximate arithmetic performance, but the strength of these correlations was moderated by the difficulty level of the arithmetic task. The simple symbolic approximate arithmetic task was equally related to both tasks. In contrast, for more difficult symbolic approximate arithmetic tasks, the contribution of number comparison ability was smaller than that of the number line estimation ability. These results indicate that the strength of contribution of the different types of numerical processing depends on the difficulty of the symbolic approximate arithmetic task.

Domain-Specific and Domain-General Skills as Predictors of Arithmetic Fluency Development

“…Good symbolic number processing skills are characterized by fast and accurate responses. Symbolic number processing has been found to be a strong predictor of children's mathematics achievement across different grades in elementary school (Brankaer et al, 2017;Holloway & Ansari, 2009), and of approximate arithmetic performance (Wei et al, 2018), and arithmetic fluency (Banfi et al, 2024;Vanbinst et al, 2016, Träff, 2013. In their study, Banfi et al (2024) found number processing skills, assessed with dots and digits comparison tasks in grade 1, to predict arithmetic fluency in grades 2 and 3.…”