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

argument is corroborated by the important results of Miura and colleagues (1994) who
consistently found that Asian children (i.e., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) experiencing a
totally regular and transparent number word system (42 four ten two) outperformed their
western counterparts (i.e., France, Sweden, and the U.S.) in recoding given numbers into nonsymbolic
sets of tens and units blocks (see also Miura & Okamoto, 1989; Miura, 1987). In
this vein, the verbal number word system in most western languages is much more complex
than the symbolic Arabic number system as it is organised by different classes of number
words: (i) units (0 to 9), (ii) decades (10, 20, etc.), (iii) teens (13, 14, etc.), (iv) hundreds,
thousands, etc. For the verbalization of multi-digit numbers these number word classes are
combined by two syntactic rules, i.e., multiplicative composition as well as additive
composition (involving the requirement to overwrite zeros). For instance, three hundred
eighty-nine builds upon a product relationship of 3 x 100 and a sum relationship of 300 + 89
389 (cf. Power & Dal Martello, 1990). Typically, when children are required to transcode
verbal number words (e.g., twenty-five) into the corresponding string of Arabic digits (i.e.,
25) or vice versa, their errors are almost exclusively related to the understanding of these
syntactic principles (Barrouillet, Camos, Perruchet, & Seron, 2004; Camos, 2008; Power &
Dal Martello, 1990; 1997; Seron & Fayol, 1994; Zuber et al., 2009).
To illustrate this, consider a child who was dictated 124 but wrote 10024 or 1024.
Both of these errors reflect a misconception of the base-10 place-value system; in particular
the necessity to overwrite zeros (Power & Dal Martello, 1990). However, the syntactic
structure of number words differ between languages as for instance in German unit and
decade digit are spoken in reversed order (43 is spoken as three and forty). This inversion
property of the German language has only recently been identified to pose a major obstacle
for transcoding performance. In this vein, Zuber and colleagues (2009) assessed transcoding
performance in 130 German-speaking first graders who had to write down 64 numbers that
were dictated to them. The authors observed that, besides other common syntactic errors (e.g.,
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