Language effects in early development of number writing and reading

Steiner, Anna; Finke, Sabrina; Clayton, Francina Jane; Banfi, Chiara; Kemény, Ferenc; Göbel, Silke M.; Landerl, Karin

doi:10.5964/jnc.6929

Cited by 17 publications

(25 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…There were more syntactic errors than substitution errors (paired t(142) = 10.14, two-tailed p < 0.001) and order errors (paired t(142) = 13.57 two-tailed p < 0.001). We conclude that in line with findings from children (Shalit & Dotan, 2022;Steiner et al, 2021), for literate adults too, processing the syntactic structure of numbers poses a bigger difficulty than processing the identity of each digit or number word and their order. Within the syntactic errors, the most common errors were the first-digit decimal shifts (2.4% of all items) followed by thousand errors (1.0%) and other-digit decimal shifts (0.7%).…”

Section: The Main Difficulty Is Processing the Number's Syntaxsupporting

confidence: 88%

The syntactic origins of number-reading difficulties: a descriptive analysis of readers with and without dysnumeria

Handelsman¹,

Dotan²

2023

Preprint

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Dysnumeria, a learning disorder that disrupts number reading and writing, hinders numerical literacy and thus disturbs everyday life. However, little is known about its prevalence or its origins. Here, we provide data on the number-reading performance of typical readers (n=143) and readers with dysnumeria (n=50), who read aloud 120 multi-digit numbers. The typical readers made 6.4% errors on average, and 6.2% of them turned out to have dysnumeria – similar to the reported prevalence of dyslexia and dyscalculia. We also analyzed the types of errors, as specific error types can be traced back to specific number-reading processes. Both typical readers and those with dysnumeria exhibited a high rate of syntactic errors, indicating that the main challenge in reading numbers is the need to handle the number’s syntactic structure.

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Section: The Main Difficulty Is Processing the Number's Syntaxsupporting

confidence: 88%

The syntactic origins of number-reading difficulties: a descriptive analysis of readers with and without dysnumeria

Handelsman¹,

Dotan²

2023

Preprint

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“…A possible hypothesis is that the top-down verbal effect on the visual analyzer is centered on syntactic processes. This is consistent with the finding that syntactic processing is harder than lexical processing (Handelsman & Dotan, 2023;Moura et al, 2013;Shalit & Dotan, 2022;Steiner et al, 2021): the syntactic difficulty may increase the pressure to utilize top-down pathways -presumably a kind of cognitive organization that is more complicated and "costly" compared to simple feed-forward processing -to assist the syntactic mechanisms in the visual analyzer. An open question is whether the visual analyzer is affected not only by the syntactic aspects of language but also by its lexical aspects, namely by the linguistic characteristics of individual number words.…”

Section: Types Of Verbal-to-visual Top-down Effects In Number Readingsupporting

confidence: 82%

Top-down number reading: Language affects the visual identification of digit strings

Dotan¹

2023

Preprint

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Reading numbers aloud involves visual processes that analyze the digit string and verbal processes that produce the number words. Cognitive models of number reading assume that information flows from the visual input to the verbal production processes – a feed-forward processing mode in which the verbal production depends on the visual input but not vice versa. Here, I show that information flows also in the opposite direction, from verbal production to the visual input stage. Participants read aloud briefly-presented multi-digit strings in Hebrew, in which the order of words is congruent with the order of digits (21 = twenty-and-one), and in Arabic, in which the ones word precedes the tens word (one-and-twenty). The error-by-digit-position curve, which reflects the order in which the visual analyzer scans the digits, was affected by language: relative to Hebrew, in Arabic the error rate was slightly higher for the decade digit, indicating later processing, and slightly lower for the unit digit, indicating earlier processing. I conclude that the visual analyzer of Arabic speakers processed the unit digit before the decade digit, in accord with the language-specific order of words. The same effect was observed even within participant, when bilingual participants read numbers in Hebrew and in Arabic. I conclude that the digit scanning order is not fixed for each person, but is determined in real time, according to the current linguistic context, via a top-down, verbal-to-visual information flow.

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“…Learning to process the syntax of numbers during childhood takes years to master and continues long after the lexical knowledge—the digits and the number-word names—was obtained (Cheung & Ansari, 2020 ; Dotan & Dehaene, 2016 ; Shalit & Dotan, 2022 ). Moreover, when reading numbers, children (Moura et al, 2013 ; Power & Dal Martello, 1990 , 1997 ; Shalit & Dotan, 2022 ; Steiner et al, 2021 ) and adults (Dotan & Friedmann, 2018 ; Dotan & Handelsman, in prep.) make more syntactic than lexical errors.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Syntactic chunking reveals a core syntactic representation of multi-digit numbers, which is generative and automatic

Dotan

Brutman

2022

Cogn. Research

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Representing the base-10 structure of numbers is a challenging cognitive ability, unique to humans, but it is yet unknown how precisely this is done. Here, we examined whether and how literate adults represent a number’s full syntactic structure. In 5 experiments, participants repeated number-word sequences and we systematically varied the order of words within each sequence. Repetition on grammatical sequences (e.g., two hundred ninety-seven) was better than on non-grammatical ones (hundred seven two ninety). We conclude that the participants represented the number’s full syntactic structure and used it to merge number words into chunks in short-term memory. Accuracy monotonously improved for sequences with increasingly longer grammatical segments, up to a limit of ~ 4 words per segment, irrespectively of the number of digits, and worsened thereafter. Namely, short chunks improved memorization, whereas oversized chunks disrupted memorization. This chunk size limit suggests that the chunks are not based on predefined structures, whose size limit is not expected to be so low, but are created ad hoc by a generative process, such as the hierarchical syntactic representation hypothesized in Michael McCloskey’s number-processing model. Chunking occurred even when it disrupted performance, as in the oversized chunks, and even when external cues for chunking were controlled for or were removed. We conclude that the above generative process operates automatically rather than voluntarily. To date, this is the most detailed account of the core representation of the syntactic structure of numbers—a critical aspect of numerical literacy and of the ability to read and write numbers.

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Language effects in early development of number writing and reading

Cited by 17 publications

References 34 publications

The syntactic origins of number-reading difficulties: a descriptive analysis of readers with and without dysnumeria

The syntactic origins of number-reading difficulties: a descriptive analysis of readers with and without dysnumeria

Top-down number reading: Language affects the visual identification of digit strings

Syntactic chunking reveals a core syntactic representation of multi-digit numbers, which is generative and automatic

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