Exploring the linguistic complexity of third-grade numerical literacy

Abstract

Reading numbers aloud, a central aspect of numerical literacy, is a challenging skill to acquire, but the origins of this difficulty remain poorly understood. To investigate this matter, we examined the performance of 127 third- and fourth-grade children who read aloud, in Hebrew, numbers with 2–5 digits. We found several key observations. First, we observed a substantial variation among the 3rd graders—7% and 59% errors in the top and bottom deciles, respectively. Second, the task difficulty stemmed from syntactic processing: Most errors were distortions of the number’s syntax, as opposed to digit substitutions or transpositions, and the main factor affecting a specific number’s difficulty was not its magnitude, as is commonly assumed, but rather its syntactic structure. Third, number reading performance was not predicted by a school-like task that assessed syntactic-conceptual knowledge of the decimal system structure, but rather by knowledge of specific syntactic-verbal rules, suggesting that the syntactic-verbal knowledge is separate from the syntactic-conceptual knowledge. Last, there was a double dissociation between 4-digit numbers and 5-digit numbers, which in Hebrew have completely different syntactic structures: Half of the children showed a significant advantage in one number length compared to the other, with equal numbers of children preferring either length. This indicates that the different syntactic-verbal rules are learned relatively independently of each other, with little or no generalization from one rule to another. In light of these findings, we propose that schools should specifically teach number reading, with focus on specific syntactic-verbal rules.