GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: Noemon on June 27, 2006, 11:36:46 AM
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How interesting is this (http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn9422-mother-tongue-may-determine-maths-skills.html)?
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I have a feeling that it's probably a lot less interesting than that article makes it out to be, but I'll have to wait until after work to write a more thorough response.
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Well, apparently I didn't get to it tonight. Hopefully tomorrow.
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I'm interested to hear your thoughts, but I definitely understand not having time to get around to composing them.
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This study sounds flawed on multiple levels, though I'd probably have to read the original study to be sure on a few issues. The biggest problem is this: is it reasonable to assume that linguistic differences account for the differences in the MRIs of the participants?
My first thought would be that it's a result of different pedagogical methods in China and English-speaking countries. According to the article, "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." I'd give that a lot more weight than I'd give to the linguistic differences.
The majority of the study seems to hinge on a rather suspect claim:
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”.
Morphologically speaking, the Chinese number system is marginally "simpler" than the English number system. And even if the morphological simplicity of a language's number system contributes to its speakers math skills, why would it result in a visual understanding of numbers?
And anyway, this is probably ridiculously easy to disprove. All you have to do is find a language with a more morphologically complex number system whose speakers are better at math than English speakers, or, conversely, a language with a more morphologically simple number system whose speakers are worse at math than English speakers.
This study is just one more in a long list of studies that have tried and failed to prove the popular notion that language serves as some sort of programming language for the brain that affects a speaker's ability to think in certain ways. Language Log (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/) has covered this sort of thing many times, so I'll try to dig up some of the relevant links and let you read opinions from real experts.
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Have you ever read Babel17?
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Nope.
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Wow. Here's a post (http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/%7Emyl/languagelog/archives/001944.html) about a study that refutes the claims in the New Scientist article very aptly. In summary, patients with severe grammatical impairment and some phonological and orthographic impairment were still able to do math just fine.
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In my field case studies of Asians raised speaking only English, I'd have to say that if their math skills would have been raised by speaking Chinese, they would be freakin' robots.
I think the funniest incident relative to this is my sister bought a used Matrix Analysis book, and she thought she recognized some handwritten notes in it. It turned out to have been a book our baby brother sold back.
But yeah, if there is a linguistic component, I would think it would be the tonality element to Chinese and not the orthographic. This doesn't help explain the Japanese, though. But neither does the orthographic explanation, since Japanese does have an alternate phonographic system IIRC.
But mainly I think the explanation is anthropological, in that lack of intelligence and ambition has a much greater impact on the opportunity to mate in Eastern cultures than in Western traditions. Also, I see no basis to assume that the language is the cause of math ability and not the other way around. I do think relatively widespread literacy has a longer tradition in the East than in the West, but that may just be my bias.
Get this... for several centuries in the west being literate actually decreased your chances of reproducing because in general much of the literate class was celibate. Granted, white people did make it to the moon first and all that.