The patterns of the odd-even effect on product verification in Hong Kong Chinese

Twenty Hong Kong Chinese undergraduate students were recruited to examine t he patterns of the odd-even effect observed in Lemaire and Fayol (1995). In the present study, the odd-even effect was found only in difficult problem s for which problems and answers were presented simultaneously. Since parti cipants in the present study were believed to possess faster retrieval spee d than those in Lemaire and Fayol (1995), the results suggest that memory r etrieval and parity-checking are executed in parallel, and are consistent w ith the multiple-strategy hypothesis which states that there is a horse rac e between the fact retrieval and parity-checking processes during verificat ion. Implications about the superiority of Chinese in solving simple arithm etic are also discussed.