In line with findings about dissociating reading abilities, Piras and Marangolo [ 45] were able to determine different cortical foci for reading Arabic numerals, number words, and words in their lesion analysis study.
In the 16th century, one Gerald Plunkett of Dublin added a series of Roman numerals numbering the chapters of the Gospels according to the division created by 13th-century Archbishof of Canterbury Stephen Langton.
Stimuli were Arabic numerals (numbers 1 to 9) in different visual patterns, that appeared one after the other at the center of a computer screen (see Figure 1 for an example) (see Additional file 1 for the full list of stimuli).
You will usually see 1 of 2 types of clocks: The most common type of clock uses Arabic numerals numbered 1 through 12. Another type of clock uses Roman numerals between I and XII.
Numerals (column "Number") correspond to those in Figure 1.
Therefore, comparisons between reading Arabic numerals and number words are hard to interpret in general.
Our second instructional principle was therefore to cement links between non-verbal quantity representation and other developing symbolic representations of numbers, such Arabic numerals or number words.
Interestingly, accuracy for comparing Arabic numerals vs. number words did not differ significantly (p = .946), while accuracy for comparing Arabic digits and number words both were significantly higher than comparing animals (hypothesis 2).
Nevertheless, a few patients showed the opposite and rather surprising pattern, being more impaired in comparing the magnitude of Arabic numerals or number words than in comparing the size of animals.
Although chimps, monkeys and parrots can learn to associate Arabic numerals (or number words) with numbers of items (Ferster 1964; Matsuzawa 1985; Washburn and Rumbaugh 1991; Pepperberg and Gordon 2005), few have so far exhibited any benefit to using such symbolic, rather than one-to-one correspondence, representations.
