reading

Louis J. Sheehan.

Learning to read 2,500 pictorial symbols, as Chinese students do in grade school, yields a 5-point advantage on IQ tests, compared with the scores of Westerners whose languages are based on alphabets, according to a new analysis of mental capabilities of Greek and Chinese children. The international team of analysts, led by psychologist Andreas Demetriou of the University of Cyprus in Nicosia, attributes the scoring disparity to a superiority in visual and spatial tasks that comes with learning to read Chinese.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

"Our findings support the assumption that reading and writing systems are powerful methods for influencing the development of mental abilities, and perhaps brain growth, in individuals and in cultures," Demetriou says.

First, the team considered a measure of general intelligence derived from IQ scores (SN: 2/8/03, p. 92: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/articles/20030208/bob10.asp). Overall, Greek and Chinese kids exhibited comparable general intelligence despite a slight IQ advantage for the Chinese. This new finding, which appears in the March/April Intelligence, undermines the controversial proposal of an innate intelligence advantage for Asians, as compared with whites. That view is supported by recent reports of slightly larger brain sizes, corrected for body size, among Chinese people.

Demetriou and his colleagues tested 120 Greek and 120 Chinese schoolchildren, ages 8 to 14. The group included an equal number of boys and girls from each country and from each grade. Most of the kids came from middle-class families.

Each child completed age-appropriate tests of mental speed and efficiency, memory, and reasoning aptitude. Test problems in these areas contained verbal, mathematical, and spatial information.

Chinese children outscored their Greek peers by 5 to 7 IQ points.

The pattern of findings at different ages indicates that the edge derives almost entirely from the honing of spatial sensibilities in Chinese readers, Demetriou says. Extremely small proportions of both Chinese and Greek 8-year-olds scored high on spatial problems. By age 12, however, 18 percent of Chinese kids ranked as highly efficient visualizers, compared with 6 percent of Greek children. That gap slightly diminished by age 14, with 26 percent of Chinese and 16 percent of Greek youngsters qualifying as particularly good visualizers.http://ljsheehan.livejournal.com

The study shows that "what have previously been argued to be differences based on biological qualities can be explained by differences in experience that often vary with racial or cultural membership," remarks psychologist Marc Lewis of the University of Toronto.

Demetriou acknowledges that his interpretation of the data requires that additional experiments show that Westerners who learn to read only Chinese score higher on spatial tasks than do Chinese who learn to read only an alphabetic language.

The new evidence that the Chinese writing system influences spatial perception "is plausible but far from definitive," says Yale University psychologist Robert J. Sternberg. For instance, he notes, Asians might possess an evolved spatial facility that promoted their adoption of pictorial symbols in writing rather than alphabetic ones.http://louis-j-sheehan.info

Canadian psychologist J. Philippe Rushton of the University of Western Ontario in London says that other evidence leans toward a biological basis for the IQ differences. "Something innate" gives the Chinese a mental edge over whites, he says, noting that Chinese kids adopted at birth by U.S. parents also tend to score higher on IQ tests than their white peers do. Rushton champions a controversial evolutionary hierarchy of racial intelligence in which East Asians come out on top.

acoustic

A common childhood language disorder stems from a brain-based difficulty in discerning the acoustic building blocks of spoken words, especially in noisy settings such as classrooms, a new study suggests.http://Louis-J-sheehan.info

Researchers estimate that as many as 7 percent of U.S. elementary school students experience substantial problems in understanding what others say and in speaking comprehensibly, despite good physical health, normal hearing, and average-or-better intelligence. The precise grammatical failures of children with this condition, known as specific language impairment (SLI), remain controversial.

Psychologist Johannes C. Ziegler of the University of Provence in Marseille, France, and his colleagues find that these children's subtle problems in identifying spoken consonants in quiet settings become far worse with the addition of background noise.

In kids free of language problems and in youngsters with SLI, constant background noise disrupted consonant detection more than intermittent background noise did. But both types of background sounds undermined speech perception much more in children with the language disorder than in the others, the scientists report in the Sept. 27 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.http://Louis-J-sheehan.info

Ziegler's group studied 20 French children, most 10 to 11 years old, who had been diagnosed with SLI at a Marseille hospital. Testing also included 20 kids, ages 10 to 11, and another 20 kids, most 8 to 9 years old, all with no language problem. The researchers included the younger group because their language skills were similar to those of the 10- and 11-year-olds with SLI.

Participants listened through headphones to a woman uttering a series of vowel-consonant-vowel combinations, such as aba, ada, and aga. Their job was to repeat each utterance or to point it out from among 16 choices displayed on a computer screen.

In some trials, it was quiet as the woman spoke. In others, she spoke over either a steady background tone or a tone that faded in and out in a regular sequence.

The children with SLI correctly identified 95 percent of the consonants presented without background noise, only slightly below the near-perfect performance of the other two groups. However, consonant detection in the SLI group fell to 72 percent correct with fluctuating background noise and hit 62 percent with static background noise.

Corresponding drop-offs for the other two groups were slight in comparison—with accuracies of 94 percent and 86 percent for older children and 91 percent and 83 percent for younger ones.

Ziegler's group proposes that children with SLI hear just fine, but that their brains have difficulty picking out speech sounds from a stream of acoustic information.

However, some other scientists disagree. For instance, Mabel L. Rice of the University of Kansas in Lawrence suspects that the condition stems from miswiring or delayed growth of brain networks responsible for grammar use.

"It's hard to know if the kids in this new study had SLI as many researchers now define it," Rice remarks. Other investigators have found that the speech-articulation deficits that Ziegler's group observed rarely accompany SLI in the general population of elementary school children but often turn up in medical clinics. So, Rice argues, the test group had problems beyond typical SLI.