The Importance of Magnitude Information in Numerical Processing: Evidence from the SNARC Effect

Models of the numerical cognitive system differ in the importance they attach to magnitude information in numerical processing. In this paper, the necessity of addressing a central semantic number system in arabic number processing is evaluated by looking at the SNARC-effect. This effect has been interpreted as an indication of access to the semantic system. In Experiment 1, we replicated the effect in a parity judgement task. In Experiment 2, we extended the SNARC-effect to a phoneme monitoring task, showing that magnitude information was accessed during arabic-to-verbal transcoding. We conclude, therefore, that number magnitude plays a more important role than is generally accepted.