Today’s increasingly globalized job market and accelerated migration means that ever more people are seeking work and study opportunities abroad – they are adjusting to new languages and often raising their children multilingual. With the help of brain activity measurements, a research team in Luxembourg found that even for multilingual people it requires an “extra effort” to solve arithmetic tasks in the second language.
According to previous research, humans can intuitively recognize small numbers up to four; however, when faced with a slightly more demanding task like calculating, we depend on the help of language. With this in mind, a research team led by Dr Amandine Van Rinsveld and Professor Dr Christine Schiltz from the Cognitive Science and Assessment Institute (COSA) at the University of Luxembourg investigated whether multilinguals’ mathematics skills are influenced by the language used. More specifically, if presented with an arithmetical task in different languages (of which they have a very good command), what goes on in multilingual people’s brains as they solve these tasks?
In order to research this fascinating topic, the researchers recruited participants with Luxembourgish as their mother tongue, who successfully completed their primary schooling in German, and then continued their academic studies in a francophone university in Belgium, speaking French. Thus, the participants were fluent in both German and French languages, however they had taken their first maths classes in German and later switched to French in their higher education.
The participants were asked to first solve a very simple and later a bit more complex addition task, both in German and in French, while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used simultaneously to measure the participants’ brain activity. By observing the time it took the participants to solve the tasks, and the amount of errors made, the researchers found that the subjects were able to solve the simple addition task equally as well in both languages. However, the more complex task required more time and more errors were made when it was in French, as compared to an identical task in German. Not only that, but by observing the fMRI scans it was found that solving arithmetic tasks in the second language of instruction (French) took more “cognitive effort” and activated different brain regions than solving it in the first language (German).
This study is therefore the first to document that language has a clear effect on one’s calculatory processes! Findings just like this will gain more and more importance in the future, as the job market is increasingly globalizing and more people migrate to work and/or study outside of the linguistic area that they grew up in.
Source material from Science News