By Clare Jamieson
Numbers can be represented in various ways: visually, with numerals (e.g. 97) and verbally, with number words (e.g. ninety-seven). In our daily lives, we often have to convert from one representational system to another, a process called transcoding. This spring, Clare Jamieson conducted an experiment to investigate whether bilingual adults’ first language could influence how they transcode numbers in English. Clare shares her results in this blog post.By
Number transcoding in German and French: what do we know already?
Children have been shown to be faster or more accurate when transcoding number words that closely reflect the numeral than when transcoding number words in systems where the relationship is less transparent. For example, many German numbers are pronounced in a different order than how they’re written: 97 is siebenundneunzig (“seven-and-ninety”), and French uses a twenty-based system for some numbers: 97 is quatre-vingt-dix-sept (“four-twenty-ten-seven”). Bilingualism complicates transcoding as all the languages a person speaks are usually activated, and the structure of number words varies between languages. Though transcoding differences owing to number word structure are widely thought to even out as children get older, the limited research on number transcoding in adults points to second language on first language influence. Higher second language proficiency led to lower accuracy on a first-language transcoding task when the first language included inversion but the second language did not.
Learning to count in one system influences transcoding in a second language
My study, supervised by Caitlin Meyer and Heleen de Vries, aimed to explore whether learning to count in a less transparent language affects number transcoding in English in adults who speak both languages fluently. Twenty-three adult participants, who had learned to count in German or French, did two tasks in English: a dictation task in which they heard a two-digit number and typed the numeral and a matching task in which they decided if the number they heard was the same as the numeral they saw. For French-speaking participants, no significant effects of first language were found, so we cannot know if learning numbers in a twenty-based system affects their number transcoding in English. In the matching task, German speakers took significantly longer than French speakers to decide whether a spoken number and a numeral matched when they were inverted versions of each other (like “sixty-seven” and 76). This demonstrates that learning to count in one number system can influence number transcoding in a second language, even for highly proficient adults. Specifically, number inversion in a first language can delay the processing of numbers in a second language without inversion.