The neural basis of number word processing in children and adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The ability to map number words to their corresponding quantity representations is a gatekeeper for children's future math success (Spaepen et al., 2018). Without number word knowledge at school entry, children are at greater risk for developing math learning difficulties (Chu et al., 2019). In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the neural basis for processing the meaning of spoken number words and its developmental trajectory in 4- to 10-year-old children, and in adults. In a number word-quantity mapping paradigm, participants listened to number words while simultaneously viewing quantities that were congruent or incongruent to the number word they heard. Whole brain analyses revealed that adults showed a neural congruity effect with greater neural activation for incongruent relative to congruent trials in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and left intraparietal sulcus (LIPS). In contrast, children did not show a significant neural congruity effect. However, a region of interest analysis in the child sample demonstrated age-related increases in the neural congruity effect, specifically in the LIPS. The positive correlation between neural congruity in LIPS and age was stronger in children who were already attending school, suggesting that developmental changes in LIPS function are experience-dependent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".