A study presented by scientists from Harvard and Cambridge universities throws some really interesting conclusions. And is that The learning of numbers, or the concept of these, depends on the language spoken at home.
For example, Slovenian and Arab children understand these concepts before English-speaking children and these in turn are faster than Japanese children.
Language structure
How quickly numbers are learned depends on the language itself and the structures used to describe the concepts of "number." Thus, the English language distinguishes between plural and singular (one button, two buttons) while Japanese and Chinese do not. On the other hand, Slovenian and Saudi children, whose languages have no root in common, present different concepts for the singular, couples and groups of three or more. So in Slovenia, a button is a gumb, two buttons are gumba, and three or more buttons are gumbi. These distinctions that in principle could complicate learning act in the opposite way facilitating the understanding of the concepts "one", "two", "many" more quickly.
The idea that calling these three concepts differently facilitates numerical learning is not new, at least among linguists. But now this relationship has been demonstrated.
The evidence
As there may be different ways in which parents teach numbers to their children it was not very clear, at first, that the grammar of the plura-singular directly affected learning. That is why a group of English, Saudi, Slovenian and North American researchers conducted a study on dozens of children between two and four Slovenian, Saudi and English years. The researchers tested them like "Put two buttons in the box" and "tell me what's in this letter?"
For each age group, the concept of "two" was known by many more Slovenian and Arab children than by their English friends. In fact, 42 percent of Slovenian two-year-olds knew the concept of "two," while only four percent of English children knew it. Slovenian and Arab children around the age of 4 knew the concept of "two" much better than Russian, Japanese and Chinese children and without emabargo, there was almost no difference between Slovenian and Arab children.
As they grow older, English-speaking children overcome their Slovenian counterparts in knowing the highest numbers. This is because Slovenian parents do not usually teach their children to count explicitly as do English parents, the inventors wrote.
There seem to be several factors that affect the way children learn the concepts of numbers. This study shows that language structure is especially important for numbers below four and that for higher numbers children use other methods.
Via | popular science Photo | lisaclarke on Flickr On Babies and More | Language and the environment, Language development in the child: two to three years, Language development in the child: three to four years
