The study aimed to examine the difficulties of children with hearing impairment in acquiring arithmetic skills at the preschool stage. Two groups of children, one with hearing impairment and another who were typically developing were assessed on a ‘Pre-Arithmetic School Readiness Test’. The test that was developed as a part of the current study elicited responses for questions presented through the visual and auditory modality, for questions that required open and closed set responses. The findings of ANOVA, MANOVA and independent t-test indicated that the children with hearing impairment performed poorer than the typically developing children in three of the four subcategories of the test (auditory-open, auditory-closed, & visual-open). The only sub-section where the children with hearing impairment performed better was the visual-closed sub-category. While the children with hearing impairment performed similar to the typically developing children on tasks involving number concepts and shapes, they performed poorer on fundamental operation of addition and subtraction. The test was found to be sensitive to the difficulties of the children with hearing impairment in acquiring arithmetic concepts as it differentiated the performance of the two participant groups.

Pre-arithmetic skills, open-set performance, closed-set performanc, number concept, fundamental operation