You May Be Counting in the Wrong Language

Scientists are studying the language of numbers and their effect on learning math. For most numbers, English does pretty well in describing, say, sixty-five. But the numbers eleven and twelve don't inherently mean anything in base ten, and the rest of the words for teens don't quite mesh with the system for numbers twenty and above. In contrast, in Mandarin Chinese, all numbers between ten and 100 are spoken with the same convention: the words for 92 translates to "nine ten two."

In other languages, the tens and units of numbers are inverted. For example, in Dutch, 94 is written vierennegentig (or “four and ninety”), and other research suggests this may make it harder to do certain mathematical processes.

For example, Dutch kindergarten children performed worse than English children on a task that required them to roughly add together two-digit numbers. This was despite the fact they were slightly older and had better working memory, because Dutch kindergarten starts later than in the UK. But on nearly every other metric, including counting ability, roughly adding and comparing quantities of dots, and simple addition of single-digit numbers, the two groups performed at the same level.

"The fact that they were the same in every other aspect, apart from the condition where two digits showed up, shows you that it's the language that is making the difference,” says Iro Xenidou-Dervou, lead author on the study and lecturer in mathematical cognition at Loughborough University.

Read more on the research into the way we say numbers and what that means for education at BBC Future. -via Damn Interesting

(Image credit: Flickr user chia ying Yang)


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