Number processing of <scp>A</scp>rabic and <scp>H</scp>ebrew bilinguals: Evidence supporting the distance effect

Abstract

Abstract In the current study, a direct assessment of the effect of language lexical‐syntactic structure and magnitude semantic access on numerical processing was made by contrasting the performance of A rabic/ H ebrew bilinguals in a digital ( H indi‐digits/ A rabic‐digits) and verbal numerical comparison task ( A rabic, an inverted language: Units‐Decades, H ebrew, a non‐inverted language: Decades‐Units). Our data revealed in the digital presentation format (Experiment 1) a regular distance effect in A rabic language‐ H indi digits and H ebrew language‐ A rabic digits, characterized by an inverse relation between reaction times and numerical distance with no difference in the mean reaction times of participants in A rabic‐ L1 and H ebrew‐ L2 . This indicates that both lexical digits of two‐digit numbers in L1 and L2 are similarly processed and semantically accessed. However in the verbal presentation format (Experiment 2) a similar pattern of distance effect was found, but the mean reaction times in A rabic were lower than in H ebrew in each numerical distance. This indicates that the processing of two‐digit number words in L1 and L2 is semantically accessed and determined by the syntactic structure of each language.