Deafness and early language deprivation influence arithmetic performances

Abstract

It has been consistently reported that deaf individuals experience mathematical difficulties compared to their hearing peers. However, the idea that deafness and early language deprivation might differently affect verbal (i.e., multiplication) vs. visuospatial (i.e., subtraction) arithmetic performances is still under debate. In the present paper, three groups of 21 adults (i.e., deaf signers, hearing signers, and hearing controls) were therefore asked to perform, as fast and as accurately as possible, subtraction and multiplication operations. No significant group effect was found for accuracy performances. However, reaction time results demonstrated that the deaf group performed both arithmetic operations slower than the hearing groups. This group difference was even more pronounced for multiplication problems than for subtraction problems. Weaker language-based phonological representations for retrieving multiplication facts, and sensitivity to interference are two hypotheses discussed to explain the observed dissociation.

Stronger neural response to canonical finger‐number configurations in deaf compared to hearing adults revealed by FPVS‐EEG

“…This difference between deaf signers and hearing controls was not merely due to experience with hand processing, since finger‐counting configurations did not elicit any Group differences in Experiment 2. It therefore seems that not only behavioural performances on numerical tasks are influenced by the atypical sensorimotor experiences deaf signers have (Buyle & Crollen, 2022 ; Buyle et al, 2022 ), but also the brain correlates underlying finger‐number configurations are shaped by these experiences.…”