Early symbolic numeracy and gross, fine, and perceptual-motor skills in Mexican preschool children

The relation between early numeracy and motor skills has previously been examined, however,different results have been obtained depending on whether gross, fine,or perceptual-motor skills wereconsidered in the study and the numeracy outcomes that were analyzed. The goal of the present research wasto examine the relationbetween preschool children’s performance on two assess-ments of symbolic numeracy and gross, fine, and perceptual-motor skills. A total of one-hundred-and-twenty-threeMexican preschool children were assessed on their gross, fine, and perceptual-motor skills, their numeracy skills (i.e., applied problem-solving and sym-bolic number comparison) their numeracy precursor skills (i.e., number identification, cardinality and verbal counting), inhibitory control and visual-spatial working memory. Results from hierarchical linear regressions showed that applied problem-solving was pre-dicted only by children’s numeracy precursor skills while theability to compare two symbolic numbers wassignificantly predicted only by perceptual-motor skills. The study highlights the importance of perceptual-motor skills to children’s early numeracy learning.