Do number systems in native languages affect math performance?

Question

This blog post said that Asians are good at math because Asian languages have less-confusing number systems:

So if it’s not the schools, what accounts for Asians succeeding in math across different education systems? As English speakers, we may be unaware, but the English language is perhaps the most odd and irrational language around. Particularly with numbers, in English, after ten the teens each have an unique name and each tenth following that gets their own name. In fact, one would need to learn 28 unique words to count up to 100 in English while in any Chinese dialect, Japanese, or Korean, one only needs to learn 11 – one through ten and one hundred.

In Asian languages like Chinese, numbers after ten follow a precise logic. Eleven in Mandarin is shi yi or ten-one, twelve is ten-two, thirteen is ten-three, and so forth. When we get to fifty-nine, the logic continues, five-ten-nine. Five tens and a nine, 59. The internal logic in counting numbers with Asian languages results in kids who speak Asian languages are able to count beyond a hundred before English speakers can even count to 40. But the Asian language advantage doesn’t stop in counting. Remember those dreaded fractions? In English we would read 3/4 as three-fourths. But for languages like Chinese, 3/4 is literally translated, “out of 4 parts, take 3″.

and I also found "Why Jews are good at math", which also mentioned the decimal system in Hebrew.

This problem further raised my attention after I saw some articles about why many adults are confused over English grammar, due to the "its" vs. "it's" and "their" vs. "they're" distinctions, plus articles about how language reforms affect literacy rates so I am thinking that less confusing language rules leads to better learning.

So do simpler, less-confusing number systems confer advantages in learning math?

Answer 1

This seems to be a partial case of Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

There is one example that is usually cited the math site of it is on the Wiki article:

Other research of importance to the study of linguistic relativity has been Daniel Everett's studies of the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon. Everett observed several peculiarities in Pirahã culture that corresponded with linguistically rare features. The Pirahã for example have neither numbers nor color terms in the way those are normally defined, and correspondingly they don't count or classify colors in the way other cultures do. Furthermore when Everett tried to instruct them in basic mathematics they proved unresponsive. Everett did not draw the conclusion that it was the lack of numbers in their language that prevented them from grasping mathematics, but instead concluded that the Pirahã had a cultural ideology that made them extremely reluctant to adopt new cultural traits, and that this cultural ideology was also the reason that certain linguistic features that were otherwise believed to be universal did not exist in their language.

This doesn't prove causation in any way, but is a curious piece of evidence.

Answer 2

It has been hypothesised from experimental evidence that the shorter syllable lengths of words in Chinese allow one to memorise larger numbers than one would otherwise be able to in English (all Chinese number terms from 1-10 are monosyllabic)

The Chinese subjects, at all grade levels, remembered at least 2 more digits, on average, than did American or Japanese subjects.

Personally, I prefer to use Chinese for mental calculations for exactly this reason, despite being more fluent in English.

Therefore, it is likely that the number system pronunciation has some effect on at least one part (the mental storage and recall of numbers) of math performance.