Abstract
Despite the importance of language and mathematical abilities in children's development, there is still a lack of systematic empirical research on how language skills affect mathematical skills. There are two main theories that focus on the relationship between language and mathematical ability: the thinking function hypothesis and the medium function hypothesis. Based on the two hypotheses, the present study investigates the impact of meta-linguistic abilities on mathematical abilities among Chinese language users from quantitative traits and genetic level. Results showed that phonological awareness, morpheme awareness, rapid automatize naming, and orthographic awareness all have an impact on arithmetic ability, mathematical reasoning ability, and visual spatial ability both directly and by means of decoding ability after controlling for performance IQ, sex and age. Polygenic scoring for language abilities were found to be able to predict arithmetic and mathematical reasoning abilities rather than visual spatial abilities. Indicating that the impact of meta-linguistic abilities on mathematical abilities is partly due to the mediating role of reading ability, and may also be due to the overlapping cognition basis between meta-linguistic abilities and basic computational ability. Our findings provide a deeper understanding of how meta-linguistic abilities impact mathematical abilities, offering valuable insights into the comorbidity of language and mathematical deficits.