The influence of the place-value structure of the Arabic number ...

METHOD
The reported experiment was part of a larger cross-cultural project investigating the
early development of numeracy in children with different number words systems. Children in
Italy and Austria were examined in a variety of numerical and non-numerical tasks. For the
sake of brevity, this article will focus on the cross-cultural effects on performance in the
number line task.
Participants: 130 German-speaking first graders (63 girls; see Moeller et al., 2009a)
and 107 Italian speaking first graders (55 girls) participated in the study 1 . The Germanspeaking
children were recruited from five Austrian elementary schools and were speaking
German as their native language. Their mean age was 7 years 4 month (SD = 7.1 month). The
Italian speaking children were recruited from two elementary schools in Italy, speaking Italian
as their native language. Their mean age was 6 years 11 months (SD = 3.4 months). The age
difference between the two samples was significant [t(236) = 6.68, p > .01]. The higher mean
age of Austria children can be attributed to the fact that in Austria some children go to
preschool first, thus entering first grade one year later. All children had normal or corrected to
normal vision.
The study took place at the end of first grade. Please note that the curriculum
regarding math education is virtually identical in Austria and Italy. In particular, children in
both countries should have mastered the numbers up to 20 (including 0) under consideration
of cardinality, ordinality as well as first arithmetic operations (i.e., addition and subtraction)
within this range. Furthermore, basic numerical competencies such as quantity discrimination
and matching as well as quantity comparisons should have been acquired.
1 Please note that the German-speaking sample was identical to that investigated by Moeller et al. (2009a).
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