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Native Language Affects the Brain's Mathematics Processing

Using MRI brain imaging, Yijun Liu, Yiyuan Tang, and colleagues found different patterns of brain activity between native English spakers and native Chinese speakers during an arithmetic task using Arabic numbers.

When trying to solve a problem of addition, English speakers showed activity in a language area of the brain - called the perisylvian cortex - while native Chinese speakers used a brain region involved in the processing of visual information.

Both groups showed the same activity in the inferior parietal cortex, a brain region involved in quantity representation and reading, but engaged different neural networks during a number comparison task. The findings suggest that arithmetic calculation depends more on language than a simple number comparison, and that native language helps shape how the brain processes these different number tasks.

Taken from: "Arithmetic processing in the brain shaped by cultures" by Yiyuan Tang, Wuitian Zhang, Kewei Chen, Shigang Feng, Ye Ji, Junxian Shen, Eric M. Reiman, and Yijun Liu.

The author is currently on sabatical at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; tel: 541-346-4931 (day); tel: 541-868-3993 (evening).

Id: 
24
Start Date: 
Thursday, September 7, 2006