NUMBER TRANSCODING IN CHILDREN - A FUNCTIONAL-ANALYSIS

French-speaking second-grade children from France and Wallonia were as ked to write down in the Arabic code, numbers orally presented at six successive one-month-spaced sessions. The evolution of the children's production (patterns of correct responses and errors) is analysed and tentatively interpreted through the model of number and calculation pr ocessing developed by McCloskey in adult neuropsychology. In order to evaluate their number production and comprehension mechanisms the chil dren were furthermore submitted to other number processing tasks. It i s tentatively concluded that the children's difficulties in the Arabic written task were localized at the level of the production of the Ara bic sequences and that the regular pattern of errors some of them pres ent is more easily explained by the lexical model of numbers processin g recently proposed by Power & Dal Martello (1990), than by McCloskey' s model (1992).