Language does arithmetic: linguistic differences in children’s place-value processing

The representation and retrieval of multiplication facts is dependent on linguistic specificities such as number word inversion (i.e., 23 is spoken dreiundzwanzig in German which translates to three and twenty). Previous research has evaluated these language influences in adults. Now this study aims to follow-up on earlier findings and takes a closer look at inversion-related effects on place-value processing during multiplication in children. In a task of choice 46 children, either German- or Italian-speaking, had to pick the right answer out of two options for a given multiplication problem. Already established effects in adult participants such as decade-consistency and table-relatedness were also present in elementary school children, but different between the language groups. For decade-consistent items the effect of table-relatedness was larger for Italian-speaking students than for German-speaking. This indicates that the inversion property in the German language leads to those children putting less emphasis on the tens digit when solving multiplication problems, than Italian-speaking children.