While few nowadays would accept the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, there is evidence for a weak Whorfian effect on numerical abilities. The difficulty of transcoding has been studied in children, who require several years of practice to acquire the relevant skills (Brizuela & Cayton, 2008 Cayton & Brizuel a, 2007 Noel & Turconi, 1999 Power & Dal Martello, 1990 1997 Scheuer, Sinclair, Merlo de Rivas, & Tieche-Christinat, 2000 Seron & Fayol, 1994 Zhou, Wang, Wang, & Wang, 2006), and well as in adults with dyscalculia caused by brain damage (Deloche & Seron, 1982a, b Seron & Deloche, 984 Seron & Noel, 1995).Īccording to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) language influences mechanisms of thinking, including mechanisms of number processing (Butterworth, Reeve, Reynolds, & Lloyd, 2008 De Cruz, 2009). However, transcoding processes are not as easy as they might initially seem to be. Transcoding is involved in many daily activities, such as telling the time, reading a price, or using telephone numbers, and it is also a prerequisite for calculations. This step of translating numbers from one context to another is called “transcoding” or “conversion” and is considered a crucial aspect of number processing. They can write an Arabic numeral according to dictation or read an Arabic numeral aloud for example, 4 is equal to ארבע in Hebrew, أربعة in Arabic, and four in English. All educated adults can shift from one notational system (number symbol) to another without substantial difficulty. In contrast, Arabic numerals are used mostly to write multi-digit numbers (27, 564) and in mathematical calculations. Naturally, number words are employed mainly in spoken language (as in a conversation) but are often used also when writing small numbers (two oranges, five cars). These diverse representations evoke various mental processes that are involved in the understanding, calculation, and production of Arabic numerals and verbal numbers (number words) ( Dehaene, 1992). Numbers may be presented differently for example, Arabic numerals (0123456789) are distinct from Hindi numerals (۰۱۲۳٤٥٦۷۸۹), and verbal numbers (one, two, three) and may vary by language. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. It is concluded that familiarity with the verbal counting system of the first language has a greater influence on transcoding than the transparency of the counting system. Speed and accuracy are greater in Arabic-L1 than Hebrew-L2, although the Arabic counting system has the inversion feature, and is thus less transparent than Hebrew. Such errors were commoner for numbers which require processing the numerical syntactic structure than for decade numbers, or numbers from 11 to 19, which require less attention to numerical syntax. Their commonest errors were substitution errors compared to change and omission errors.
The participants made some errors in reading and especially in writing two-digit numbers. Reading times and the error rates were calculated in both languages according to type of error-total errors, substitution errors (replacement of two-digit number units with decades, and vice versa for example, 23 ? 32), change errors (change of one digit 23 ? 28), and omission errors (omission of one digit for example 23 ? 2). Sixty university bilingual students were given two tasks in both Arabic-L1 (First language) and Hebrew-L2 (Second language): One task involved writing two-digit numbers to dictation, and the other involved reading two-digit numbers aloud. For this purpose, the paradigm of reading and writing two-digit numbers from dictation, in both languages was used. the syntactic representation of numbers (inverted versus non-inverted number system). Therefore, studying transcoding in the two languages may enable us to tease out the relative effects of linguistic experience (first versus second language) and counting system transparency i.e. the first digit is the units and the second is the decades (24 = four and twenty), while in Hebrew (non-inverted), the reverse. In Arabic (inverted), two-digit numbers are written and read from right to left, i.e. The syntactic structure of numbers in Arabic mainly differs from that of Hebrew in terms of the order of units and decades.