ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Special Educational Needs
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1587968
Counting and subitizing skills in children with Down syndrome and autism spectrum disorder
Provisionally accepted
- University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
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In this study, two tasks were conducted to examine the development of counting and subitizing skills in children with intellectual disabilities, including Down syndrome (DS) and autism spectrum disorder (ASD), and the results were compared with the performance of typically developing (TD) children. The maximum countable number attained by children with DS was considerably lower than that of children with ASD. However, the subitizing range of children with DS was not substantially different from that of children with ASD or TD children, suggesting that the subitizing abilities of children with DS may be relatively well-developed. Although it was predicted that children with ASD would exhibit characteristic counting strategies such as frequent pointing and a smaller subitizing range, the results were not in line with the hypotheses. These results indicate that children with intellectual disabilities may show more specific developmental trajectories related to counting and subitizing based on disability type (DS and ASD). Moreover, children with DS may exhibit developmental variation between the two processes, in that they are often able to subitize quantities consistent with their mental age, yet demonstrate difficulty when they count to the number of objects larger than subitizing range.
Keywords: Intellectual Disabilities, Down Syndrome, Autism Spectrum Disorder, numerical development, Counting, Subitizing
Received: 05 Mar 2025; Accepted: 27 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Kobayashi, Koizumi and Kojima. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Waka Kobayashi, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
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