The number of letters in number words influences the response time in numerical comparison tasks: Evidence using Korean
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SHORT REPORT
The number of letters in number words influences the response time in numerical comparison tasks: Evidence using Korean number words Doyeon Kwon 1 & Songjoo Oh 1
# The Psychonomic Society, Inc. 2019
Abstract Here, we report that the number of letters in number words influences the response time in numerical comparison tasks. In this experiment, a pair of single Korean number words consisting of two or three letters was simultaneously presented in an area of the same size, and the participants reported which was semantically larger. The conditions were categorized as congruent, neutral, and incongruent based on the congruency between the meaning indicated by the numeral (i.e., the size of the number or semantic size) and the number of letters in each number word. In the analysis, compared to the neutral (faster) and incongruent (slowest) conditions, the response time was the fastest under the congruent condition. Thus, the congruency effect is explained by the number of letters rather than continuous visual properties (occupied area and length). These results suggest that the semantic representation of number words is automatically influenced by the number of letters they contain. Keywords Size congruency effect . Numerical Stroop effect . Korean number words . Number of letters
Introduction In a numerical comparison task, the response time (RT) varies depending on the physical size of the number notations even though this size is irrelevant to the task. Typically, when the semantic and physical dimensions of the number notations being compared are congruent, the RT is faster than that when the dimensions are not congruent (Besner & Coltheart, 1979). This size congruency effect has been extensively tested in a variety of number notations, including Arabic numerals (Henik & Tzelgov, 1982), English scripts (Damian, 2004; Foltz, Poltrock, & Potts, 1984; Vaid, 1985), Chinese scripts (Tzeng & Wang, 1983), Hebrew scripts (Razpurker-Apfeld & Koriat, 2006), and Japanese Kanji scripts (Ito & Hatta, 2003; Takahashi & Green, 1983). This effect clearly shows that the semantic processing of numbers is not independent of the visual properties, such as the physical size, occupied area, and length, although the level of numerical processing at
* Songjoo Oh [email protected] 1
Department of Psychology, College of Social Sciences, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 08826, South Korea
which the interaction occurs remains debatable, i.e., whether the interaction occurs at an early interactive representation stage (Schwarz & Heinze, 1998) or a late competitive decision stage (Cohen Kadosh, Gevers, & Notebaert, 2011; Sobel, Puri, Faulkenberry, & Dague, 2017). In this study, we attempt to expand the size congruency effect from a continuous dimension to a discrete dimension (hereafter, for the convenience of discrimination, we call these effects the continuous size congruency effect and the discrete size congruency effect, respectively). In general, printed number notations are composed of several
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