Numerical abilities in a group of young preterm children

Difficulties in mathematics are often reported in the literature in preterm children. However, it is unknown whether these difficulties stem from general cognitive capacity deficits or from specific and primary numerical ability impairments. In order to shed light on this matter, we assessed preterm and control children on their intelligence, language skills and processing speed as well as on their performance in numerical symbolic (number words and digits) and non-symbolic comparison (object collections) tasks. Our results reveal specific difficulties for 5-year-old preterm children in the production of the verbal number sequence. Moreover, preterm children show greater distance effects in the numerical comparison tasks, which suggest that, as children with dyscalculia, they present a severe number sense deficit.