The "meaning" of structure in digits

A simple dictation task composed of a random order of digits in both the Arabic and English language shows that children learning these digits map the structures of 7 and γ making them confuse the directions these digits face. A Kohonen self organizing feature map was used to represent each digit as a vector and assess their \´closeness\´ by competition but it failed to explain this behavior. A tensor based Kohonen map was designed to represent digits as matrices and seems to result in a relatively better representation. However, this too fails to explain the behavior, which implies that the behavior can only be explained through the \´meaning\´ of digit structure. When children learn how to write a digit, the direction it faces seems to be a \´semantic\´ value associated with the digit and is not described as part of the structure but is "inferred" from it.