On Fri, 1 Dec 2000, Adam Pressler wrote:
> Without getting too deep into the Bell-curve-bullshit,
> let me say that I do not believe there are
> racial/ethnic differences in intelligence. I don't
> even think the arguments make sense in any biological,
> demographic or epistemological way.
>
> However, I do wonder if there might be a relationship
> between math skills and the language of first
> proficiency. It seems that since the rules of
> expression for mathematics is universal across
> cultures, but the rules of expression for language are
> not, maybe someone growing up speaking a germanic
> language (for example) may have an edge over someone
> speaking a romance language when it comes to
> mathematics.
>
Interesting study in the Journal of Ed psych a few years back, don't have the reference handy: from an early age, Chinese kids outperform U. S. kids in math, even after controlling for obvious confounds like SES and parents' math skills. The researchers speculated that the difference in math skills was due to language-- apparently the Chinese words for numbers like eleven and twelve translate into English as "ten and one", "ten and two", and so on. Thus learning how to say numbers in Chinese encourages kids to think in terms of addition. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis strikes again!
Miles