The Problem-size Effect in Mental Addition: Developmental and Cross-national Trends

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Abstract
Across two experiments, the magnitude of the problem-size effect in mental addition was examined for kindergarten and elementary school children, as well as adults, from mainland China and the United States. In North American samples, the problem-size effect represents the finding that arithmetic problems consisting of larger-valued numbers (e.g. 8+7) take longer to solve and are more error prone than are problems consisting of smaller-valued numbers (e.g. 2+3). This standard finding was found for the kindergarten, elementary school, and adult samples from the United States. For the Chinese children, the problem size effect was evident in kindergarten and at the beginning of first grade. However, the effect had disappeared at the end of first grade and had reversed (i.e. largervalued addition problems were solved more quickly than smaller-valued problems) by the end of third grade. However, the standard problem-size effect “reappeared” for the Chinese adults. The results are interpreted in terms of theoretical models of the nature of the memory representation for arithmetic facts and in terms of the mechanisms that govern the development of these representations.