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Heather Brand's avatar

Very fun to read this after all of our chatting about this topic in the Science of Math group! I will share with my team!

Thought you might like this and related research links: https://ece.umd.edu/news/story/the-brain-makes-sense-of-math-and-language-in-different-ways

Yes, teen numbers are very opaque (plus you run out of fingers at ten), so it makes sense that your son hasn’t yet carried his new addition knowledge into the teens. In the other decades (twenTY, thirTY, fourtTY, etc) the place value is more clear in a sense of a set number of tens and clear directionality. FourTEEN has a sense of ten but is backwards in that the four part of it comes first, making kids want to write 41. And twelve has no sense of ten in the morphology at all, though the tw hints and its “two-ness.” Eleven loses all sense of ten or one more for kids and has to be memorized without any morphological clues. Without explicit instruction, kids with phonological difficulties are likely to also miss the morphological patterns in those more transparent numbers - another link to phonological difficulties affecting math learning!

Also, I think it’s worth quantifying the comment that “plenty of kids” who have reading difficulties don’t have math difficulties. Depending on the study, about 70% of kids with reading difficulties will also have math difficulties. Yet between the cultural acceptance of math difficulty being normal and the myth that dyslexia only affects reading, I consistently hear from parents that their child was diagnosed with dyslexia and schools would only address the reading difficulty, despite clear math difficulty, telling parents to “wait and see” with math. And as you noted, phonological difficulty gets in the way of some really crucial & foundational math learning, causing the “wait and see” approach to just leave those kids further behind. As an interventionist, I just wanted to advocate for that point to readers since I so persistently hear that schools think dyslexia only affects reading, but yet math difficulty its clearly associated with dyslexia for a majority of students. And math difficulty is actually a greater predictor of poverty, incarceration, and health difficulty than reading difficulty according to one study I saw from the UK.

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Mark Anderson's avatar

Great connection! I don't have the research at my fingertips, but I think there may be a parallel foundational aspect for mathematical development of number counting using fingers (alongside the language you point to here)

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