Las habilidades lingüísticas y el sistema numérico aproximado en la eficacia del cálculo aritmético

INTRODUCTION. The development of arithmetic competence is a key component of the school curriculum and an essential factor in daily life. An adequate understanding of how numerical cognition develops in the first years of formal education, as well as the cognitive bases that underpin this process, is fundamental both for the design of effective educational practices and for the diagnosis of children with learning difficulties in math. The purpose of this study is to contribute to the knowledge about arithmetic development at the school stage. This article analyses the independent contribution of phonological processing, vocabulary, working memory and the Approximate Number System (ANS) in the performance of the calculation in general in the school stage. METHOD. A sample of 679 students from 3rd to 6th grade in the city of Montevideo was evaluated. A multilevel regression was carried out in order to analyze the specific contribution of phonological processing, vocabulary, approximate number system and working memory in the performance of arithmetic calculation. RESULTS. The findings of this study show that working memory, phonological processing, vocabulary and the approximate number system contribute independently to calculation fluency, being the linguistic skills (vocabulary and phonological processing) the ones that explain the greater proportion of the variance of the performance in arithmetic calculation. DISCUSSION. These results and their implications are discussed in the framework of the arithmetic acquisition models and its difficulties.