Recent research has suggested that numeral order processing – the speed and accuracy with which individuals can determine whether a set of digits is in numerical order or not – is related to arithmetic and mathematics outcomes. It has therefore been proposed that ordinal relations are a fundamental property of symbolic numeral representations. However, order information is also inherent in the verbal count sequence, and thus verbal count sequence knowledge may instead explain the relationship between performance on numeral order tasks and arithmetic. We explored this question with 62 children aged 6- to 8-years-old. We found that performance on a verbal count sequence knowledge task explained the relationship between numeral order processing and arithmetic. Moreover many children appeared to explicitly base their judgments of numerical order on count sequence information. This suggests that insufficient attention may have been paid to verbal number knowledge in understanding the sources of information that give meaning to numbers.

最近的研究表明，数字顺序处理（即个人确定一组数字是否为数字顺序的速度和准确性）与算术和数学结果有关。因此已经提出，序数关系是符号数字表示的基本属性。但是，顺序信息在语言计数序列中也是固有的，因此，语言计数序列知识可以代替地解释数字顺序任务的执行与算术之间的关系。我们与62名6至8岁的儿童探讨了这个问题。我们发现，在口头计数序列知识任务上的表现解释了数字顺序处理和算术之间的关系。而且，许多孩子似乎将他们对数字顺序的判断明确地建立在计数序列信息的基础上。这表明，在理解赋予数字含义的信息来源时，可能没有充分注意口头数字知识。