Abstract:
Reading numbers aloud, a central aspect of numerical literacy, is a challenging skill to acquire, but the origins of this difficulty remain poorly understood. To investigate this matter, we examined the performance of 127 third- and fourth-grade children who read aloud, in Hebrew, numbers with 2-5 digits. We found several key observations. First, we observed a substantial variation among the 3rd graders-7% and 59% errors in the top and bottom deciles, respectively. Second, the task difficulty stemmed from syntactic processing: Most errors were distortions of the number\'s syntax, as opposed to digit substitutions or transpositions, and the main factor affecting a specific number\'s difficulty was not its magnitude, as is commonly assumed, but rather its syntactic structure. Third, number reading performance was not predicted by a school-like task that assessed syntactic-conceptual knowledge of the decimal system structure, but rather by knowledge of specific syntactic-verbal rules, suggesting that the syntactic-verbal knowledge is separate from the syntactic-conceptual knowledge. Last, there was a double dissociation between 4-digit numbers and 5-digit numbers, which in Hebrew have completely different syntactic structures: Half of the children showed a significant advantage in one number length compared to the other, with equal numbers of children preferring either length. This indicates that the different syntactic-verbal rules are learned relatively independently of each other, with little or no generalization from one rule to another. In light of these findings, we propose that schools should specifically teach number reading, with focus on specific syntactic-verbal rules.
摘要:
大声朗读数字,数字素养的核心方面,是一项具有挑战性的技能,但是这种困难的起源仍然知之甚少。为了调查这件事,我们检查了127名三年级和四年级大声朗读的孩子的表现,在希伯来语中,2-5位数的数字。我们发现了几个关键的观察结果。首先,我们观察到三年级学生之间的实质性差异-顶部和底部十分位数的错误为7%和59%,分别。第二,任务困难源于句法处理:大多数错误是数字语法的扭曲,与数字替换或换位相反,影响特定数字难度的主要因素不是它的大小,正如人们通常认为的那样,而是它的句法结构。第三,数字阅读性能没有通过评估十进制系统结构的句法概念知识的类似学校的任务来预测,而是通过了解特定的句法-言语规则,这表明句法-言语知识与句法-概念知识是分开的。最后,4位数字和5位数字之间存在双重分离,在希伯来语中具有完全不同的句法结构:一半的孩子在一个数字长度上与另一个数字长度相比具有显着优势,孩子的数量相等,喜欢两种长度。这表明不同的句法-言语规则是彼此相对独立地学习的,从一个规则到另一个规则的概括很少或没有。根据这些发现,我们建议学校应该专门教授数字阅读,专注于特定的句法-言语规则。