Number Transcoding in Children - a Functional-analysis

French-speaking second-grade children from France and Wallonia were asked to write down in the Arabic code, numbers orally presented at six successive one-month-spaced sessions. The evolution of the children's production (patterns of correct responses and errors) is analysed and tentatively interpreted through the model of number and calculation processing developed by McCloskey in adult neuropsychology. In order to evaluate their number production and comprehension mechanisms the children were furthermore submitted to other number processing tasks. It is tentatively concluded that the children's difficulties in the Arabic written task were localized at the level of the production of the Arabic sequences and that the regular pattern of errors some of them present is more easily explained by the lexical model of numbers processing recently proposed by Power & Dal Martello (1990), than by McCloskey's model (1992).