title: Intransparent German number words complicate transcoding - a translingual comparison with Japanese.
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.
authors.affiliation: Knowledge Media Research Center Tuebingen, Germany ; Department of Psychology, University of Tuebingen Tuebingen, Germany ; LEAD Graduate School, University of Tuebingen Tuebingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Korbinian
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Moeller
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Tuebingen Tuebingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Zuber
authors.affiliation: Section Neuropsychology, Department of Neurology, RWTH Aachen University Tuebingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Naoko
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Olsen
authors.affiliation: Knowledge Media Research Center Tuebingen, Germany ; Department of Psychology, University of Tuebingen Tuebingen, Germany ; LEAD Graduate School, University of Tuebingen Tuebingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Hans-Christoph
authors.initials: HC
authors.lastname: Nuerk
authors.affiliation: Section Neuropsychology, Department of Neurology, RWTH Aachen University Tuebingen, Germany.
authors.forename: Klaus
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Willmes
keywords: German; Japanese; number-word system; transcoding