The trouble with teens: Accessing the structure of number names

Abstract

The English language forms names for two digit numbers beginning with one (i.e., “teens”) using different rules than those used for naming larger two-digit numbers. The distinction between teens and other two-digit numbers was explored in four studies that looked at adult subjects' ability to form reverse numbers, defined as the number resulting from switching the tens-place and ones-place digits of a stimulus number. In Study 1, subjects had more difficulty reversing numbers ending in one (e.g., seeing “71” and saying “seventeen”) than they did reversing other two-digit numbers. Study 2 explored the possibility that this difficulty manipulating teens might be limited to situations in which subjects had to access the morphological structure of number names in the presence of a number named according to different rules. When subjects had to reverse numbers as in Study 1, but these numbers were presented in a mirror image font, the special difficulty in reversing teens numbers disappeared. Because the teens class is a peculiarity of English and other Western languages, Studies 3 and 4 looked at number reversing times in Chinese-English bilinguals. When speaking Chinese, no difficulty in reversing teens was found in Study 3. When bilingual Chinese-English speakers performed the number-reversing task in English, however, trouble reversing names of numbers in the teens was again found in the fourth study. Implications for theories of the organization and acquisition of mathematical competence are discussed.