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It is commonly found that deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) students experience delayed mathematical achievement. The present study used two nonsymbolic comparison tasks to explore the basic numerical skills of DHH students. Nine prelocutive DHH students with cochlear implants and nine hearing students, matched on nonverbal IQ, visual short-term memory, and verbal comprehension, were recruited. The participants performed two different collection comparison tasks with different ratios and under different perceptual conditions. Analyses by task showed similar response times, accuracy, and ratio effects for both groups on the Low Perceptual Condition task, a finding suggesting that the two groups accessed similar representations of quantity. Differences in performance on the simpler High Perceptual Condition task, on which the DHH group showed slower response times, probably were strategic in origin. The results suggest that DHH students have no deficits in basic numerical skills.

Deaf children usually achieve lower scores on numerical tasks than normally hearing peers. Explanations for mathematical disabilities in hearing children are based on quantity representation deficits (Geary, 1994) or on deficits in accessing these representations (Rousselle & Noël, 2008). The present study aimed to verify, by means of symbolic (Arabic digits) and nonsymbolic (dot constellations and hands) magnitude comparison tasks, whether deaf children show deficits in representations or in accessing numerical representations. The study participants were 10 prelocutive deaf children and 10 normally hearing children. Numerical distance and magnitude were manipulated. Response time (RT) analysis showed similar magnitude and distance effects in both groups on the 3 tasks. However, slower RTs were observed among the deaf participants on the symbolic task alone. These results suggest that although both groups' quantity representations were similar, the deaf group experienced a delay in accessing representations from symbolic codes.

The aim of the present study was to advance the knowledge of the linguistic development of students with prelingual profound deafness, especially the acquisition and use of prepositions in Spanish, a lexical category with an important role in the verbal comprehension. The researchers sought to learn the level of mastery students with prelingual profound deafness can achieve in the command of prepositions, depending on the system of communication they have been exposed to: classic oralism, Cued Speech, or signed language. The results show that the different systems of communication contribute, to different degrees, to the acquisition of Spanish prepositions, with the best results being obtained with Cued Speech.