We have noticed for some time that Asian populations tend excel in Math and Science but I haven’t heard a convincing argument for why this may be until now. Malcolm Gladwell, author of the well-acclaimed “Tipping Point” and “Blink,” has written a new book called “Outliers: The Story of Success.” While Roger Gathman has some criticisms for the book, the guardian.co.uk published an excerpt from the book that provides a provocative, if not compelling, case for why Asian children are better at math.
The first point has to do with the brevity of spoken digits in Chinese and the nature of memory (example comes from Dehaene’s “Number Sense“):
Take a look at the following list of numbers: 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6. Read them out loud. Now look away and spend 20 seconds memorising that sequence before saying them out loud again. If you speak English, you have about a 50 per cent chance of remembering that sequence perfectly. If you’re Chinese, though, you’re almost certain to get it right every time. Why is that? Because as human beings we store digits in a memory loop that runs for about two seconds. We most easily memorise whatever we can say or read within that two-second span. And Chinese speakers get that list of numbers – 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 – right almost every time because, unlike English, their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds.
The second point has to do with the structure of the number system (contrasting Chinese languages with Western ones):
It turns out that there is also a big difference in how number-naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed. In English, we say fourteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, so one might expect that we would also say oneteen, twoteen, threeteen, and fiveteen…The number system in English is highly irregular. Not so in China, Japan, and Korea. They have a logical counting system. Eleven is ten-one. Twelve is ten-two. Twenty-four is two-tens-four and so on.
Put together, these two factors mean, so the argument goes, that Asian children learn to count faster, can count higher (before their Western counterparts), and are more facile with mathematical computations:
Four-year-old Chinese children can count, on average, to 40. American children at that age can count only to 15, and most don’t reach 40 until they’re five. By the age of five, in other words, American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills.
The regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions, such as addition, far more easily. Ask an English-speaking seven-year-old to add thirty-seven plus twenty-two in her head, and she has to convert the words to numbers (37 + 22). Only then can she do the math: 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50, which makes 59. Ask an Asian child to add three-tens-seven and two-tens-two, and then the necessary equation is right there, embedded in the sentence. No number translation is necessary: it’s five-tens-nine.
For fractions, we say three-fifths. The Chinese is literally ‘out of five parts, take three. That’s telling you conceptually what a fraction is. It’s differentiating the denominator and the numerator.
What’s fascinating about all of this is that something as fundamentally simple as the word we choose to use to represent certain concepts in language (numbers in this case) can have a profound impact on cognition. For the most part, words have not been explicitly chosen by cultures—so you might say that by happenstance of a culture, the people of that culture are better (or worse) off than a neighboring culture in some domain. In this case, we’re talking about the impact of language and memory on math skills; Jared Diamond has looked at the impact of culture and environment on the rise and fall of civilizations (in “Gun, Germs, and Steel” and “Collapse”). As Gladwell concludes, you’ve got to wonder: “how many other cultural legacies have an impact on our 21st-century intellectual tasks.”
