Verbal Number System Transparency Reduces Number Size Effects in Base-Ten Tasks

Geuquet, Cloé;Masson, Nicolas;De Smedt, Bert;Lê, Mai-Liên;Noël, Marie-Pascale
(2026) Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie Kongress — Location: Luxembourg (7.September.2026)

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Abstract
Languages vary according to the degree of transparency to base-ten of their verbal number systems. In many Asian languages, verbal numbers express explicitly their decimal structure (e.g., “78” expressed as “seven-ten-eight”) whereas most Western languages exhibit varying degrees of opacity either through specific lexicons for teens and decades (e.g., “twelve”, “twenty”) or through decade-units order (e.g., “78” expressed as “eight and seventy” in Dutch). It is still debated whether transparency influences the development of base-ten comprehension which has been considered as a function of the powers of ten defining the number, starting with two-digit numbers, followed by three-digit numbers, etc. However, the observation of size effects within two-digit numbers in preschool children challenged this assumption. Here, we addressed the language transparency debate and investigated whether number size effects are modulated by the transparency of the verbal number system. We tested Vietnamese, Dutch- and French-speaking first graders on a large spectrum of base-ten tasks, controlling for general cognitive ability, arithmetic level, home numeracy and socio-economic status. Our results revealed that larger numbers led to more errors and less use of elaborate strategies. Crucially, children speaking opaque languages exhibited a stronger size effect than in the Vietnamese group, in which this effect was reduced or even absent. The modulation of the size effect by language transparency suggests that the irregularity and lexical complexity of opaque languages hinder performance, pointing to a lexical rather than purely conceptual origin of the observed differences.
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Geuquet, C., Masson, N., De Smedt, B., Lê, M.-L., & Noël, M.-P. (2026). Verbal Number System Transparency Reduces Number Size Effects in Base-Ten Tasks. Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie Kongress, Luxembourg. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/272394