ABSTRACT
Serial position refers to the position of each member of a pair of numbers relative to the boundaries of the ordered sequence of single-digit numbers. As for symbolic distance, the serial position effect was also obtained with numbers symbolized by patterns of dots, and there was no interaction between the serial position effect and the type of script. One concerns the difference between numerals and number names and the other, the difference between logographic and phonographic number representations. In phonographic systems the linguistic units represented by each symbol are phonological, being either syllables in syllabic systems of phonemes in alphabetic systems. The picture that emerges from contrasting logographic and phonographic representations of numbers in numerical comparison judgments is incomplete, but quite consistent. From the standpoint of understanding how numbers represented logographically or phonographically are processed, the study of laterality should be considered as one of the tools for analysis of processing operations into components.
