What children's number naming errors tell us about early understanding of multidigit numbers

Abstract

This investigation examined the nature and development of a foundational symbolic numeric skill-number identification-focusing on children's emerging knowledge of multidigit numbers. Two studies were conducted with Russian preschoolers. Study 1 (N = 350; 51-77 months of age) investigated age-related changes in the accuracy of number naming and in the types of errors children produced. The errors fell into distinct categories: syntactic (structural errors such as naming each digit separately without using place-value markers) and lexical (nonstructural errors such as replacing the name of a digit with the name of another digit). Number reading accuracy improved with age, primarily due to a decreased frequency of syntactic errors. Boys made fewer syntactic errors than girls. Study 2 (N = 110; 61-74 months of age) showed that accuracy of naming double-digit numbers was related to conceptual understanding of the base-10 numeric structure. The frequency of syntactic errors in number naming was negatively associated with the use of base-10 representations, whereas lexical errors were not related to children's ability to represent base-10 number structure. Implications for understanding children's mathematics trajectories are discussed.

Keywords: Base-10 stucture; Error analysis; Multidigit number; Number representations; Numeral identification; Symbolic number skills.