Is the Chinese Number-Naming System Transparent? Evidence from Chinese-English Bilingual Children

Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, Mar 2006 by Rasmussen, Carmen, Ho, Elaine, Nicoladis, Elena, Leung, Joyce, Bisanz, Jeffrey

When comparing children from two different cultures, it is difficult to evaluate the contribution of these cultural variables. In Miller et al.'s (1995) research, for example, factors other than the transparency of the Chinese number-naming system were not evaluated. Miller et al. argued that formal education did not directly affect their results because the Chinese children performed better than American children before entry into school. It is possible, however, that preschool children's performance could have been affected by other aspects of culture, such as practice with counting as well as games and songs involving numbers (Geary, 1996; Guberman, 1999), use of numbers in idiomatic expressions, and motivational factors. Indeed, experience with numbers might lead children to notice the transparency of number names (Saxton & Towse, 1998; Towse & Saxton, 1997). Clarifying the role of parental practices and beliefs in the development of counting will require converging evidence with direct measures of children's daily experience with counting.

Transparency may have effects that differ across populations and domains (Brysbaert, Fias, & No�l, 1998), of course, and the factors that affect counting performance in bilingual children may not be the same as in monolingual children. Miller et al.'s (1995) conclusion that transparency is important for monolingual Chinese children is compelling because predictions based on transparency were matched precisely by the data. Transparency does not account for counting performance in bilingual children, however. Whereas the transparency of the Chinese number-naming system may be helpful for Chinese monolingual children, perhaps Chinese-English bilingual preschool children do not benefit either because they do not have sufficient exposure to counting in Chinese or because learning to count in English obscures the transparency of Chinese. Future research needs to be focused on the kinds of activities in which children are engaged - between and within cultures - that lead to better counting.

This research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science and Engineering Research Council of Canada. We would like to thank Kevin Miller for methodological advice, Ellen Bialystok for comments on a previous draft of this manuscript, and the directors and teachers of the preschools and Saturday schools that participated. An early version of this paper was presented at the biennial meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development in August 2002.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Carmen Rasmussen, Department of Pediatrics, University of Alberta. 137 Glenrose Rehabilitation Hospital, 10230-1 llAve, Edmonton, Alberta, T5G OB7 (E-mail: carmen@ualberta.ca).

References

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