Mother tongue may determine maths skills

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, 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.