Scientists are preparing to study a little understood problem suffered by children who are deaf or hard of hearing.
Parents and teachers of children with hearing problems are well aware that they often struggle in maths as well as in other subjects.
According to a recent study by the National Center on Low-Incidence Disabilities in America, children with these disadvantages lag farther behind their hearing classmates in maths than they do in reading.
Other studies have suggested that these children's difficulties with reading are related to language skills, instructional methods, and underlying cognitive strategies.
But their problems with maths have not been widely explored.
Now new research conducted by Dr Rebecca Bull, of the University of Aberdeen, and Dr. Marc Marschark, Honorary Professor at the Universities of Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and Director of the Centre for Education Research Partnerships at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, is about to investigate this area.
Thanks to £800,000 worth of funding from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development in America, the researchers will spend four years trying to come up with answers.
They hope deaf and hard of hearing people aged between 5 and 25 will help with their study which will examine a range of areas including memory and attention skills; parental and child attitudes to maths and basic number skills.
Initially researchers plan to recruit children from the Aberdeen School for the Deaf as well as from other schools across the city and Aberdeenshire. The study may also be rolled out across Scotland.
Dr Marschark is heading up the US end of the research which will see children and adults recruited in a number of East Coast states.
Dr Bull, who is leading the Scottish side of the study, said: "These studies will provide the first look at how social-motivational, language, and cognitive abilities of deaf children influence their development of maths abilities.
"With this knowledge, we should be able to develop instructional strategies that take advantage of students' strengths while accommodating their needs."
Dr. Bull and Dr Marschark are attending a British Association of Teachers of the Deaf meeting taking place in Glasgow in November so they can talk to teachers about the project.
In the meantime, anyone interested in finding out more can contact them at r.bull@abdn.ac.uk or mmarscha@education.ed.ac.uk. More information on the project is available at http://www.rit.edu/ntid/cerp.