Posted on 06/27/2006 4:32:30 PM PDT by blam
Mother tongue may determine maths skills
17:55 27 June 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi
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, Yijun Liu at the University of Florida McKnight Brain Institute, US, and colleagues recruited 12 local college seniors in the northeastern Chinese 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.
(Excerpt) Read more at newscientist.com ...
Uh, this is Bush's fault right?
Yes, in Japanese also the names for eleven through nineteen are more logical than those used in English (though I think French is worse with its very odd naming conventions for numbers under 100).
I do think that inconsistency in naming has some influence on young children trying to grasp the decimal system, and I would not mind seeing English moving to a "ten-one" system, at least for teaching young children.
Waaaah! Racism and cultural bias! Waaaaah!
I believe this to be true as I still remember the tongue lashing I'd get from my mother when I didn't do my math homework.
So I'd say yes, my mothers tongue definitely had an effect on my ability to do math
Lessee, like such a small sample is truly scientific...
We always struggled a bit with Gaelic's system that is somewhat twenty-based. (But the Gaels have taken to base-10 systems more recently.)
How would that help in binary, or hexidecimal?
The Babylonians, however, used a hexasegimal (base 60) system
Which we still use today,....but not the fractional part....
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The main fault of the Babylonian system was the absence of a zero. But the Ancient Mayans' vigesimal (base 20) system had one, drawn as a shell. Other numerals were lines and dots, similar to what we use today when we tally
It wouldn't. My experience says you just have to learn to think in other systems. Binary is difficult for the proliferation of digits. Hexadecimal isn't too difficult, once you've cleared the hurdle of knowing two systems.
For my part, I'm just glad that octal seems to have faded away, leaving me with decimal and hexadecimal (I've pretty much forgotten the Gaelic).
How would that help in binary, or hexidecimal?
It wouldn't.
What I am referring to by a "ten-one" system is replacing the English names for the numbers 11 through 19 (in base 10.) I.e.:
| Base 10 representation | Current English name | New name |
|---|---|---|
| 11 | eleven | ten-one |
| 12 | twelve | ten-two |
| 13 | thirteen | ten-three |
| 14 | fourteen | ten-four |
| 15 | fifteen | ten-five |
| 16 | sixteen | ten-six |
| 17 | seventeen | ten-seven |
| 18 | eighteen | ten-eight |
| 19 | nineteen | ten-nine |
You could make it even more similar to Japanese by using alternative names for the tens, such as going from "twenty" to "two-ten" (or "two-tens"). Thus "twenty-one" would become "two-ten-one" (or perhaps "two-tens-one").
Yep. Both Japanese and Chinese must learn 2000 and 5000 pictographs, repectively, to be literate. This does have the tendancy of stimulating the visual side of your brain.
On the other hand, the time spent training this side of your brain is often at the expense of the creative side.
Which goes a long way to explain why Asian cultures may be short on inventions, but great at commercializing these inventions. The transistor and fax are two immediate examples which come to mind.
Children/people who study or play a musical instrument (especially the piano) have greater mathematical ability. There have been a couple studies re this and it is fascinating.
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