The relationships between verbal and mathematical performances were examined in 60 children (26 girls and 34 boys, mean age = 9.1 yr, SD = 0.3) for scores on standard school tests. Scores for numerical problem solving appeared to correlate mainly with verbal performances such as text comprehension (r = 0.65, p < .05) and knowledge of vocabulary (r = 0.61, p < .05) among linguistic performances. Such results suggest that the dichotomy between verbal and numerical cognitive abilities, commonly involved in pedagogical approaches, is an ambiguous notion for the analysis of problem-solving performance.
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