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Mother tongue may determine maths skills
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| tathi |
Lira and others may find this interesting:
| quote: | Newscientist
The native language you speak may determine how your brain solves mathematical puzzles, according to a new study. Brain scans have revealed that Chinese speakers rely more on visual regions than English speakers when comparing numbers and doing sums.
Our mother tongue may influence the way problem-solving circuits in our brains develop, suggest the researchers. But they add that different teaching methods across cultures, or genes, may also have primed the brains of Chinese and English speakers to solve equations differently.
The findings may help educators to identify the best way to teach young students maths. Leaders of North American engineering schools and technology companies worry that youngsters in the region lag behind those in China and Japan in terms of computational skills.
Research published in 2001 has fuelled their concerns: a study comparing Canadian and Chinese students found that the latter were better at complex maths (Journal of Experimental Psychology, vol 130, p 299). But experts have wanted basic information about how brain function differs between the groups.
College seniors
In the latest study, researchers led by Yiyuan Tang at Dalian University of Technology, China, recruited 12 local college seniors in the northeastern city of Dalian, where Mandarin is spoken.
The team also recruited 12 native English speakers from the US, Australia, Canada and England to teach in Dalian. All participants were in their twenties, and both groups had equal numbers of women and men.
The volunteers lay in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) brain scanner while solving maths puzzles. They had to push a button, for example to indicate whether a third digit was equal to the sum of the first two numbers presented to them.
All tests were conducted using Arabic numerals, used by English-speaking cultures and taught to Chinese students at an early age.
The brain scans showed similar activity in the parietal cortex of both groups’ brains, a region thought to give a sense of quantity.
Additional areas
“But native English speakers rely more on additional brain regions involved in the meaning of words, whereas native Chinese speakers rely more on additional brain regions involved in the visual appearance and physical manipulation of numbers,” says Eric Reiman of the Banner Good Samaritan Medical Center in Phoenix, Arizona, US, one of the team.
Specifically, Chinese speakers had more activity in the visual and spatial brain centre called the visuo-premotor association network. Native English speakers showed more activity in the language network known as perisylvian cortices in the left half of the brain.
Reiman and his colleagues suggest that the Chinese language’s simple way of describing numbers may make native speakers less reliant on language processing when doing maths. For example, “eleven” is “ten one” in Chinese “twenty-one” is “two ten one”.
They also note that the use of the abacus in many Asian schools may encourage the brains of students in this region to think spatially and visually about numbers.
“The results do suggest that learning to read in a particular way - or more generally, the cultural differences associated with different language groups - may have an impact in other cognitive domains, in this case arithmetic processing,” comments neuroscientist Barry Horwitz of the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, US.
Reaction times
Reiman and his colleagues found no significant difference in the reaction time and accuracy of the Chinese and English-speaking volunteers.
Still, experts believe the study opens doors to explore the causes and consequences of brain differences in mathematical processing across cultures.
“I think this study adds to a number of others that suggest that brain imaging may start to have an impact on education,” Horwitz says. “By determining that not everybody learns in the same way, it may allow us to develop educational methods that work more effectively.”
Some experts say that the findings of the new study may convince US educators to try introducing the abacus into more maths lessons.
Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0604416103)
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http://www.newscientist.com/article...er&nsref=dn9422 |
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| Renegade |
Hmmm...
| quote: | NOAM CHOMSKY'S theory that the evolution of language provided the portal to all higher thought has taken another knock. A study of people with language difficulties suggests that mathematical skill evolved independently.
A team led by Rosemary Varley at the University of Sheffield, UK, studied three people with extensive damage to the brain's left hemisphere, including language areas. Two could not speak at all, and the third only in fragmentary sentences. All were competent calculators, though, able to solve simple subtraction, division and multiplication problems (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0407470102).
The patients could not spot syntax-based changes in meaning, for instance, in reversible sentences such as "the boy chased the girl" and "the girl chased the boy". But they had no trouble with a mathematical equivalent such as 7 - 2 and 2 - 7.
Most experts believe that understanding syntax is essential for processing mathematical statements. "We've blown that one to pieces, I think," says Varley.
Psychologist Brian Butterworth at University College London points to evidence that infants do maths long before they can speak. "The syntax of numbers is very different from the syntax of language," he says. |
http://www.newscientist.com/channel.../mg18524875.200
You're confusing me, New Scientist! :eyespop: |
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| Lira |
Very interesting article, Thati :)
Anyway, I know it might sound arrogant, but either this study has some subtle fallacies, or there are details the article didn't mention.
Here are the main problems I found:
| quote: | | Reiman and his colleagues suggest that the Chinese language’s simple way of describing numbers may make native speakers less reliant on language processing when doing maths. For example, “eleven” is “ten one” in Chinese “twenty-one” is “two ten one”. |
What they seem to forget, in this statement, is that English numerals behave exactly like Chinese numerals most of the time - the difference being that English is less regular in numbers smaller than one hundred, and there's actually a reason for that: they're more common, so they're the ones that went through more severe phonetic changes.
For example:| Number | Chinese | English |
| 2,500 | Two thousand five hundred | Two thousand and five hundred |
| 2,503 | Two thousand five hundred three | Two thousand five hundred and three |
| 41 | Four ten one | Forty one |
You can clearly see that, above 100, the difference is minimal. In fact, one cannot ignore the fact that "forty" comes from "four + ty" where "ty = group of ten" when comparing, so it is similar to Chinese after all (thirty and twenty aren't exceptions, there's just a phonetic change). In the end, both languages see "40" as being "four groups of tens".
| quote: | | The native language you speak may determine how your brain solves mathematical puzzles, according to a new study. Brain scans have revealed that Chinese speakers rely more on visual regions than English speakers when comparing numbers and doing sums. |
If anything, the alphabet would be the cause behind this, but it's not reasonable to link this difference to spoken language. Even the writing system itself might not be that different depending on how one interprets the words. I can't think of an example in English-Chinese right now, so I'm resorting to Japanese-Portuguese:
Aero + Porto = Aeroporto
空 + 港 = 空港
The same way "空" (sky) and "港" (port/harbour) can be seen as unities of meaning, so can "aero" and "porto". As a matter of fact, if you write "Haeroporto" (which sounds exactly the same way), people won't recognise the meaning because of the letter "H"... the same thing would happen if you wrote "空港" as "究港" - therefore, the visual aspect of comprehension plays an extremely similar role in both languages, even if the sounds are similar (Japanese is known to rely on ideograms because of its large number of homophones).
| quote: | They also note that the use of the abacus in many Asian schools may encourage the brains of students in this region to think spatially and visually about numbers.
(...)
“The results do suggest that learning to read in a particular way - or more generally, the cultural differences associated with different language groups - may have an impact in other cognitive domains, in this case arithmetic processing,” comments neuroscientist Barry Horwitz of the National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, US. |
There seems to be a confusion between language, culture and teaching methods here. With all these factors being present, you can't just downplay their roles, and claim that it's a difference based on language alone.
As I recall it, this "thought <-> language" dependence, as explained by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, has been proven as false already, but I'm saying this based on what I've been told (I should research in order to confirm this). |
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| Marc Summers |
I totally agree with these findings. Have any of you watched the special on a British man with Savant's Syndrome?
Here a little bit on him |
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