Abstract
Superior early numerical competencies of children in several Asian countries have (amongst others) been attributed to the higher transparency of their number word systems. Here, we directly investigated this claim by evaluating whether Japanese children’s transcoding performance when writing numbers to dictation (e.g., “twenty five” → 25) was less error prone than that of German-speaking children – both in general as well as when considering language-specific attributes of the German number word system such as the inversion property, in particular. In line with this hypothesis we observed that German-speaking children committed more transcoding errors in general than their Japanese peers. Moreover, their error pattern reflected the specific inversion intransparency of the German number-word system. Inversion errors in transcoding represented the most prominent error category in German-speaking children, but were almost absent in Japanese-speaking children. We conclude that the less transparent German number-word system complicates the acquisition of the correspondence between symbolic Arabic numbers and their respective verbal number words.
Highlights
Recent years have witnessed increasing research interest in the impact of specific language properties on numerical development
One German-speaking child was excluded from further analyses because 24 of the 25 transcoding errors of this child were non-responses
For the remaining participants there were 2.2% non-responses in German speaking children and 0.3% in Japanese children, which were not included in the analyses
Summary
Recent years have witnessed increasing research interest in the impact of specific language properties on numerical development. A large proportion of these studies focused on the comparison of Western (mostly European and American English) and Asian (mostly Korean, Japanese, and Chinese) children’s performance in mathematics. Contrasting these different languages and their cultural backgrounds revealed impressive differences in favor of children from those Asian countries (e.g., Stevenson et al, 1985; Stigler et al, 1987; Miura et al, 1999). Superiority in subtraction performance of Korean children over US children was reported (Song and Ginsburg, 1987; Fuson and Kwon, 1992) These differences are not restricted to more complex mathematical tasks like mental calculation.
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