When it comes to doing calculations and mathematical operations, bilinguals always resort toto the language in which they learned to do accounts, as revealed by a work published in the magazinePsychological Science.
The researchers, from the Basque Center for Cognition, Brain and Language, worked with 20 bilingual people. Half of them had learned math in Spanish and the other half in English. By analyzing their brain activity while the participants performed different calculations, the scientists found that they all used the language in which they had learned to perform their first counts.
The results, beyond mere curiosity, are useful to find the cause of some learning disorders such asdyscalculia, which consists of the difficulty to understand and perform mathematical calculations. For example, children schooled in a language other than the one in which they learned basic arithmetic operations will surely have many difficulties. “When a child has problems with mathematics, it is not worth saying that he is simply bad at it, he may have learning problems that can be scientifically demonstrated,” explained Elena Salillas, one of the authors of the work.
The researchers think that these results are due to the fact that people structure their memory better in the language in which they learn the concepts, even though they are fluent in several languages. It is a trace that persists for life, and although the other language is usually used, when making calculations, one always returns to the one in which the first operations were learned.
