$ways to write numbers in different languages$

Moreover, bilinguals exposed to inverted and non-inverted languages showed influence of both systems, and enhanced flexibility in processing. These findings suggest that arithmetic processing is sensitive to the linguistic representations of number words. In addition, whereas native Hebrew speakers preferred the non-inverted order in visual symbolic presentation as well, the Arabic–Hebrew bilinguals showed enhanced flexibility, without a significant preference for one order over the other, in either speed or accuracy. Arabic–Hebrew bilinguals demonstrated both flexibility in processing and adaptation to the language of aural–verbal presentation – they were more accurate for the inverted order of presentation in Arabic, but more accurate for non-inverted order of presentation in Hebrew, thus exhibiting the same pattern found for native Hebrew speakers. Problems were presented such that they matched or did not match the structure of number words in the language. Participants judged the accuracy of addition problems presented aurally in L1, aurally in L2 or in visual symbolic notation. Their performance was compared to that of Hebrew L1 speakers, who do not speak an inverted language. We examined Arabic–Hebrew bilinguals’ performance in the first language, L1 (inverted) and in the second language, L2 (non-inverted). We examined how the structure of number–words affects how arithmetic operations are processed by bilingual speakers of an inverted and a non-inverted language. Languages differ in how they represent numerical information, and specifically whether the verbal notation of numbers follows the same order as the symbolic notation (in non-inverted languages, e.g., Hebrew, “25, twenty-five”) or whether the two notations diverge (in inverted languages, e.g., Arabic, “25, five-and-twenty”).

Ways to write numbers in different languages