From 834 to Eighty Thirty Four: The Reading of Arabic Numerals by Seven- year- old Children

A group of seven-year-old Italian children was asked to transcode from arabic numerals to verbal numerals. The stimuli were written arabic numerals such as 365; the responses were spoken Italian numerals such as tre cento sessanta cinque. Several regular error patterns were observed. The less-advanced subjects fragmented complex stimuli, so that 365 would be transcoded by a numeral of the form thirty six five, or ignored part of the stimulus. Children who had just learned the word cento often used it in initial position, so that 200 was transcoded as cento due. Later, they experimented with various ways of subdividing the digit string and introducing a multiplicand, producing such errors as 834 = eighty thirty four, 803 = eighty thousand and three. The development of transcoding ability was explained by an asemantic model using production rules.