Abstract
Although verbal and numerical abilities have a well-established interaction, the impact of phonological processing on numeric abilities remains elusive. The aim of this study is to investigate the role of phonemic awareness in number processing and to explore its association with other functions such as working memory and magnitude processing. One hundred seventy-two children in 2nd grade to 4th grade were evaluated in terms of their intelligence, number transcoding, phonemic awareness, verbal and visuospatial working memory and number sense (non-symbolic magnitude comparison) performance. All of the children had normal intelligence. Among these measurements of magnitude processing, working memory and phonemic awareness, only the last was retained in regression and path models predicting transcoding ability. Phonemic awareness mediated the influence of verbal working memory on number transcoding. The evidence suggests that phonemic awareness significantly affects number transcoding. Such an association is robust and should be considered in cognitive models of both dyslexia and dyscalculia.
Highlights
Mastering reading and writing numbers in their verbal and Arabic forms is an essential skill for daily life (Lochy and Censabella, 2005)
According to what is suggested by the ADAPT model, errors rates increased with the number of rules required for number transcoding
The present study investigated the impact of phonological skills on a number transcoding task, and it is, to our knowledge, the first to simultaneously evaluate the relative impact of short-term and working memory, number sense and phonemic awareness on number transcoding
Summary
Mastering reading and writing numbers in their verbal and Arabic forms is an essential skill for daily life (Lochy and Censabella, 2005). The verbal number system is linguistically structured and, it may differ among languages, there are some common basic principles and regularities (Fayol and Seron, 2005). It is typically composed of a lexicon of single words that designate a few quantities (like five, eleven, seventy and hundred) and organized by a syntax that arranges these lexical units in order to represent any possible quantity. The two basic syntactic principles are the relations of addition and multiplication In this sense, numbers are represented as sum relationships (e.g.: eighty-one means eighty plus one) and product relationships (e.g.: three hundred means three times hundred). The number words in Portuguese are similar to the English number words in the sense that they are organized in lexical classes for units, decades and particulars (the -teens in English) (Wood et al, 2006)
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