One, Two, Buckle My Shoe: Importance of Language to Learning Math

Talk to your toddler. And use numbers when you talk. Doing so may give a child a better head start in math than teaching her to memorize 1-2-3 counting routines.

That's the takeaway of an international study published this week in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Led by David Barner, associate professor of psychology and linguistics in the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego, the study examined how well children ages 2 to 4 understand number concepts. It has been known since the 1970s that learning to count is different than comprehending what numbers really mean, said Barner, director of the Language and Development Lab at UC San Diego. A youngster who can recite numerals in the correct order, to 10 or even 20, will not necessarily be able to correctly answer "How many?" when presented with a small pile of five or even fewer. It has also been known for a long time that "later mathematical achievements are affected by the very earliest experiences, but it has been difficult to point to what exactly it is about these early experiences that matters," Barner said. So Barner and colleagues -- from University College London, King Saud University, University of Nova Gorica and MIT -- looked into the possible role of language. The researchers found a natural experiment among speakers of Slovenian in the capital Ljubljana and speakers of the Saudi dialect of Arabic. In both cases, in addition to singular and plural forms for words, the languages also make a finer grammatical distinction for sets of two. They have a "dual marker," or a piece of grammar that is similar to a plural, but that speakers use when talking about quantities of exactly two. Children who speak these dual-marking languages seem to grasp the concept of "two" much earlier than their English-speaking counterparts, Barner said, even when the children have received little to no training on counting. In fact, they are faster to begin learning number words than children learning any other language reported so far, including Russian, Japanese and Mandarin Chinese, despite the fact that some of those studied had much more experience with counting routines. "Our study provides the strongest evidence to date that the language a child speaks affects the rate at which they learn number words, and also that hearing number words in naturalistic speech -- not just in counting routines and procedures -- is a critical part of number word learning," Barner said. Interestingly, the early advantage conferred by language seems to disappear when looking at numbers over two and as the children grow. Where there are drastic differences among 2-year-olds who are "two-knowers," by age 4 the English speakers in San Diego have actually surpassed their counterparts in Riyadh and Ljubljana, and more of them understand "three" and higher. "Language provides really rich cues to number meaning," Barner said, "but language only gets you so far." After that, you do need to teach the routines. "We know that early learning about number is a critical foundation to later mathematics performance in the classroom," Barner said, "so it can only be beneficial to also expose kids to speech that contains informative cues to number concepts." In the simplest terms: It is important to teach children to memorize their 1, 2, 3s along with their A, B, Cs. And singing songs like "One, Two, Buckle My Shoe" can't hurt. But it's at least as important to put numbers into natural speech and say to your 12- to 24-month-old "There are two buttons," when pointing to a pair.
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References:

Science Daily. 2013. “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe: Importance of Language to Learning Math”. Science Daily. Posted: October 28, 2013. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131028162057.htm

Common bias known as the 'endowment effect' not present in hunter-gatherer societies

Centuries of economic theory have been based on one simple premise: when given a choice between two items, people make the rational decision and select the one they value more. But as with many simple premises, this one has a flaw in that it is demonstrably untrue.

The fields of psychology and behavioral economics have experimentally identified a laundry list of common biases that cause people to act against their own apparent interests. One of these biases — the mere fact of possessing something raises its value to its owner — is known as the "endowment effect."

A new interdisciplinary study from the University of Pennsylvania has delved into whether this bias is truly universal, and whether it might have been present in humanity's evolutionary past.

The study was led by Coren Apicella, an assistant professor in Penn's School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Psychology, and Eduardo Azevedo, an assistant professor in Wharton's Department of Business Economics and Public Policy. They collaborated with Yale's Nicholas Christakis and the University of California, San Diego's James Fowler.

It will be published in the Common Bias Known as the 'Endowment Effect' Not Present in Hunter-Gatherer SocietiesCommon Bias Known as the 'Endowment Effect' Not Present in Hunter-Gatherer Societies.

A classic endowment effect experiments involves giving participants one of two items, such as a chocolate bar and a mug, and then asking whether they would like to trade for the other. As the starting item is selected at random, there should be a 50 percent chance that participants initially receive the item they like best and thus a 50 percent chance that they will trade.

"What we see, however, is that people trade only about 10 percent of the time," Azevedo said. "Simply telling someone they own something makes them value it more. That is, the way you ask the question changes what item people prefer, unlike what you would expect from rational economic behavior."

One problem with these experiments is that they generally involve participants from so-called "WEIRD" — western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic — societies. Apicella drew on her decade-long study of the Hadza people of Tanzania to provide a new perspective. The Hadza are one of the last hunter-gatherer societies on Earth, living in small, nomadic camps that communally share nearly all their possessions.

"We wanted to examine whether the endowment effect was something that occurs in non-WEIRD societies, since they represent the vast majority of human populations that have ever existed," Apicella said. "Even if it's not a perfect window into our past, it's at least a different perspective than what you get when you study your average college student. The fact that the Hadza remain relatively isolated from Western culture, media and ideals makes them a good group with which to investigate the history and universality of biases like the endowment effect."

The history of the endowment effect is of particular interest to evolutionary psychologists, as experiments to test its presence in non-human primates, such as orangutans, chimpanzees and gorillas, has been met with mixed results. That some non-human primates exhibit the bias could mean that it was present in the last common ancestor between them and humans, but it could also mean that they learned the behavior by participating in other reward-based studies.

The area of North Tanzania where the Hadza live provided a natural way to further investigate the role of culture in transmitting this bias, as a large lake separates some, but not all, of the camps from a nearby village. People living in the camps on the near side of the lake have much more frequent interactions with tourists and commerce, often buying items from stores in the village, or selling bows and arrows to visitors.

The researchers conducted versions of the endowment effect experiment in several different camps, and compared the results.

In order to avoid bias from items that might be more or less valuable in the environment the Hadza live in, the researchers constructed the experiments so that participants chose between items that had only cosmetic differences. Participants would be given either a package of cookies, with the option to trade it for a different flavor, or given a lighter, with the option to trade it for a different color. They also ensured that the participant knew that the variety he or she received at the start was a random choice, and varied whether the participant got to physically hold the item before given the option to trade it for another variety.

"We wanted to use both food and tools, as experiments with non-human primates show an endowment effect for the former but not the latter," Apicella said. "However, we saw that it didn't make a difference whether a person was choosing between cookies or lighters. The difference-maker was their relative level of isolation from modern life."

"The more isolated Hadza traded about 50 percent of the time — which is what rational people should do," Azevedo said. People near the village traded about 25 percent of the time, which is much closer to the 10 percent we see with Western students."

"To make sure this wasn't a case of the more capitalistic people moving closer to the village, we also asked the people about their social networks," Azevedo said. "The percentage of people who named someone in a distant camp was very small. Quantitatively, it seems impossible that the difference in endowment effect between two camps could be explained by migration."

With that potential caveat accounted for, one explanation for the apparent lack of an endowment effect in the more isolated camps is that the bias is a learned behavior that comes with exposure to capitalistic societies. However, an alternative explanation could be that both groups experience the effect, but it is suppressed in the more communal groups by social pressures.

"We need to study this further to see which explanation holds," Apicella said. "Either way the results suggest that these isolated hunter-gatherers are more rational than the average western consumer when it comes to economic decisions."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “Common bias known as the 'endowment effect' not present in hunter-gatherer societies”. EurekAlert. Posted: October 28, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/uop-cbk102813.php

Huge ancient monument found in Sweden

Archaeologists have discovered a monumental structure with high wooden poles, dated at 400-500 AD in Uppsala, Sweden.

Archaeologists in Sweden have found two long rows of wooden post holes at nearly right angles to each other. One of the rows is a kilometre long and consists of 144 post holes. The other extends at least 500 metres. The holes are spaced every six metres and the rows are 500 metres apart.

“We think the wooden poles were high, perhaps over eight to ten metres. They have been easily spotted from a distance,” says the project leader of the dig, Lena Beronius-Jörpeland, an archaeologist with the Swedish National Heritage Board.

A newer version of such rows is found in Denmark, from the Viking era. But there it served as a defensive wall.

“As this is such a large tract of land, we don’t think these rows of posts would work well as protection. In those days they had castles which served that function, but they were much smaller. Maybe this monument had multiple functions,” said Beronius-Jörpeland to the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter.

Connection with the royal burial mounds

The site is just a few hundred metres from a well-known landmark, the Royal Mounds [Kungshögarna]. These are from the decades around 600 AD and had significant functions for religion and trade.

The researchers are speculating about links between the monumental linear structures and the burial mounds. The area they are in is one of the most important known from the Swedish Iron Age.

“We know there was some sort of judicial court associated with the kings who are buried in the mounds. It’s tempting to speculate that this had something to do with the newly discovered monument. Maybe it was intended as a visual manifestation of power,” says Beronius-Jörpeland.

Inspiration from abroad

The excavation has revealed animal bones in some of the holes where pillars once stood. A puppy skeleton was dug out of one, which indicates that it was sacrificed when the post was erected or the construction was completed.

The excavation of the extensive monumental structure will continue as researchers seek information on possible similar constructions elsewhere in Europe or skirting the Mediterranean. The idea is to find out whether mighty leaders who ordered the construction in  Gamla Uppsala got their inspiration from abroad.
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References:

Veka, Camilla. 2013. “Huge ancient monument found in Sweden”. Science Nordic. Posted: October 26, 2013. Available online: http://sciencenordic.com/huge-ancient-monument-found-sweden

Viking 'Parliament' Discovered Beneath Parking Lot in Scotland

A Viking parliamentary site that dates to the 11th century has been found beneath a parking lot in Scotland.

The site, located in the town of Dingwall, Scotland, was dubbed a "Thing" site, referring to its name in antiquity. Like other Thing sites, this one was likely a place where ancient Norsemen gathered to settle legal disputes, uphold laws and make key political decisions.

"It's a fantastic find, really," said Oliver J. T. O'Grady, the director of the site's excavations and an archaeologist who runs an archaeological consulting firm called OJT Heritage. "No one's had dating [information] from a Thing site in Scotland."

The Thing

Historians had long wondered whether Dingwall was a site of a Viking parliamentary gathering known as the Thing because the word Dingwall probably originated from the word thingvellir, which means "the field of the assembly."

Such Thing sites are scattered from Iceland to Norway to the Shetland Islands, and Norsemen traveled from far and wide to get to the seasonal gatherings, often to settle disputes that would otherwise end in bloodshed. But Things were held mostly at open-air fields, and people only stayed temporarily, leaving relatively few archaeological traces of their presence.

"Many archaeologists have said, 'How do you find the archaeology of a bunch of people gathering together?'" O'Grady told LiveScience.

O'Grady and his colleagues at The Thing Project, which works on similar sites around Europe, were not deterred, because traces of temporary dwelling booths had turned up at other Thing sites.

Digging up democracy

Using historical records, the team found a mound near the inlet of an estuary in Dingwall that was called the moothill, or assembly mound, in the 13th century. Later on, Scottish earls were buried there. In 1947, local authorities bulldozed the top of the mound and turned the area into a parking lot. (Parking lots seem to be rich sources of history in the U.K. — Richard III's skeleton was found underneath a parking lot, as was a medieval knight in Scotland.)

The team dug a small trench across the mound and used radioactive carbon isotopes, or atoms of carbon with different molecular weights, to date the charcoal found in the soil. (These radioactive isotopes decay at different rates and can be used to date soils and objects.)

The team found that some of the upper layers of the soil date to the medieval period, likely when it was called the moothill, and contain shards of pottery and fragments of an iron vessel.

But below that, the team found the first layers that were used to construct the mound, with soil dating to around the 11th century.

By this period of history, the Vikings were no longer feared marauders sailing the seas and raiding Europe. Instead, the people who gathered at Dingwall were more likely subjects of Norse kings who ruled from the Orkney and Shetland Islands.

No one knows yet who built the site, though the sheer size of the mound suggests it was a fairly significant undertaking that required a lot of political power and resources.

No historical documents mention a Thing gathering site near the region, but Earl Thorfinn the Mighty came down from the Orkney Islands at the time and fought a battle in the general region.

"He would certainly have had a political reason to make a statement," O'Grady said.
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References:

Ghose, Tia. 2013. “Viking 'Parliament' Discovered Beneath Parking Lot in Scotland”. Live Science. Posted: October 24, 2013. Available online: http://www.livescience.com/40674-scotland-viking-parliament-spot-found.html

Ancient Magician's Curse Tablet Discovered in Jerusalem

A lead curse tablet, dating back around 1,700 years and likely written by a magician, has been discovered in a collapsed Roman mansion in Jerusalem, archaeologists report.

The mansion, which is being excavated by the Israel Antiquities Authority in the Givati Parking Lot, is located in what is known as the "City of David," an area that holds at least 6,000 years of human occupation. The mansion itself covers at least 2,000 square meters (about half an acre) and contains two large open courtyards adjacent to each other. It was in use between the late third century and A.D. 363, when it was destroyed in a series of earthquakes on May 18 or 19.

The text is written in Greek and, in it a woman named Kyrilla invokes the names of six gods to cast a curse on a man named Iennys, apparently over a legal case.

"I strike and strike down and nail down the tongue, the eyes, the wrath, the ire, the anger, the procrastination, the opposition of Iennys," part of the curse reads in translation. Kyrilla asks the gods to ensure that "he in no way oppose, so that he say or perform nothing adverse to Kyrilla … but rather that Iennys, whom the womb bore, be subject to her…"

To obtain her goal Kyrilla combined elements from four religions, Robert Walter Daniel, of the Institut für Altertumskunde at the University of Cologne, told LiveScience in an email. Of six gods invoked, four of them are Greek (Hermes, Persephone, Pluto and Hecate), one is Babylonian (Ereschigal) and one, Abrasax, is Gnostic, a religion connected to early Christianity. Additionally, the text contains magic words such as "Iaoth" that have a Hebrew/Judaism origin.

A professional magician likely created the curse for Kyrilla, who may have literally used a hammer and nails to perform a magical rite that enhanced the effectiveness of the curse, Daniel said.

"The hammering and nailing is a form of gaining control over the person(s) targeted in magical texts," he wrote in the email.

Kyrilla and her curse-recipient, both probably members of the Roman middle or upper class, were likely in some legal dispute, as the curse tablet bears similarities to others found in Cyprus that are known to have been used in legal cases. Additionally the word "opposition" in this text hints at a legal matter.

Exploring the mansion

The newfound artifacts hint at the wealth the occupants of the mansion would have enjoyed and include a miniature head of a boxer athlete used as a scale-weight and several gems, including one engraved with an image of Cupid holding a torch.

The curse tablet itself was excavated in the northwest part of the mansion. While the second-floor room where the tablet was originally placed has collapsed, the artifacts excavated near the tablet provide hints about what the room may have looked like when in use.

Archaeologists Doron Ben Ami and Yana Tchekhanovets, both with the Israel Antiquities Authority, told LiveScience in an email they discovered the remains of mosaics and frescos that contain geometric and floral motifs near the tablet. They also found carved bone fragments from a box that depict the "Triumph of Dionysus," a Greek god, along with maritime imagery such as seahorses.

The team also uncovered roof tiles in the mansion that contain the stamp of the Roman 10th legion, a unit that, for a time, was stationed in Jerusalem. "This practice is common for all the provinces of the Roman Empire. In peaceful times soldiers were responsible for 'civil engineering': They built roads and aqueducts, produced tiles and bricks, etc. The 10th legion produced so many tiles, that it was enough for many more years of construction activity in the city, long after the legion itself left Jerusalem," Ben Ami and Tchekhanovets said.

The researchers also found female figurines, probably depicting a goddess. They were likely used in a "private cult" whose members included residents of the mansion. These figurines were found at or below floor level and may not have been part of the second-floor room that the curse was placed in.

The researchers do not know the purpose of this second-floor room. However, Iennys appears to have been connected to it to such a degree that the curse tablet was placed there intentionally. "Since the curse is directed against Iennys it might have been hidden in or close to a place that he frequented," Daniel wrote in the email. Perhaps lennys lived or worked in the mansion or a courtroom was located near the second floor room, Daniel said.

The discovery was detailed recently in the journal Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik.
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References:

Jarus, Owen. 2013. “Ancient Magician's Curse Tablet Discovered in Jerusalem”. Live Science. Posted: Available online: http://www.livescience.com/40638-ancient-curse-tablet-discovered-in-jerusalem.html

Hitchhiking virus confirms saga of ancient human migration

A study of the full genetic code of a common human virus offers a dramatic confirmation of the "out-of-Africa" pattern of human migration, which had previously been documented by anthropologists and studies of the human genome.

The virus under study, herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1), usually causes nothing more severe than cold sores around the mouth, says Curtis Brandt, a professor of medical microbiology and ophthalmology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Brandt is senior author of the study, now online in the journal PLOS ONE.

When Brandt and co-authors Aaron Kolb and Cécile Ané compared 31 strains of HSV-1 collected in North America, Europe, Africa and Asia, "the result was fairly stunning," says Brandt.

"The viral strains sort exactly as you would predict based on sequencing of human genomes. We found that all of the African isolates cluster together, all the virus from the Far East, Korea, Japan, China clustered together, all the viruses in Europe and America, with one exception, clustered together," he says.

"What we found follows exactly what the anthropologists have told us, and the molecular geneticists who have analyzed the human genome have told us, about where humans originated and how they spread across the planet."

Geneticists explore how organisms are related by studying changes in the sequence of bases, or "letters" on their genes. From knowledge of how quickly a particular genome changes, they can construct a "family tree" that shows when particular variants had their last common ancestor.

Studies of human genomes have shown that our ancestors emerged from Africa roughly 150,000 to 200,000 years ago, and then spread eastward toward Asia, and westward toward Europe.

Scientists have previously studied herpes simplex virus type 1 by looking at a single gene, or a small cluster of genes, but Brandt notes that this approach can be misleading. "Scientists have come to realize that the relationships you get back from a single gene, or a small set of genes, are not very accurate."

The PLOS ONE study used high-capacity genetic sequencing and advanced bioinformatics to analyze the massive amount of data from the 31 genomes.

The technology of simultaneously comparing the entire genomes of related viruses could also be useful in exploring why certain strains of a virus are so much more lethal than others. In a tiny percentage of cases, for example, HSV-1 can cause a deadly brain infection, Brandt notes.

"We'd like to understand why these few viruses are so dangerous, when the predominant course of herpes is so mild. We believe that a difference in the gene sequence is determining the outcome, and we are interested in sorting this out," he says.

For studies of influenza virus in particular, Brandt says, "people are trying to come up with virulence markers that will enable us to predict what a particular strain of virus will do."

The researchers broke the HSV-1 genome into 26 pieces, made family trees for each piece and then combined each of the trees into one network tree of the whole genome, Brandt says. "Cécile Ané did a great job in coming up with a new way to look at these trees, and identifying the most probable grouping." It was this grouping that paralleled existing analyses of human migration.

The new analysis could even detect some intricacies of migration. Every HSV-1 sample from the United States except one matched the European strains, but one strain that was isolated in Texas looked Asian. "How did we get an Asian-related virus in Texas?" Kolb asks. Either the sample had come from someone who had travelled from the Far East, or it came from a native American whose ancestors had crossed the "land bridge" across the Bering Strait roughly 15,000 years ago.

"We found support for the land bridge hypothesis because the date of divergence from its most recent Asian ancestor was about 15,000 years ago. Brandt says. "The dates match, so we postulate that this was an Amerindian virus."

Herpes simplex virus type 1 was an ideal virus for the study because it is easy to collect, usually not lethal, and able to form lifelong latent infections. Because HSV-1 is spread by close contact, kissing or saliva, it tends to run in families. "You can think of this as a kind of external genome," Brandt says.

Furthermore, HSV-1 is much simpler than the human genome, which cuts the cost of sequencing, yet its genome is much larger than another virus that also has been used for this type of study. Genetics often comes down to a numbers game; larger numbers produce stronger evidence, so a larger genome produces much more detail.

But what really jumped out of the study, Brandt says, "was clear support for the out-of-Africa hypothesis. Our results clearly support the anthropological data, and other genetic data, that explain how humans came from Africa into the Middle East and started to spread from there."

The correspondence with anthropology even extends, as before, to the details. In the virus, as in human genomes, a small human population entered the Middle East from Africa. "There is a population bottleneck between Africa and the rest of the world; very few people were involved in the initial migration from Africa," Brandt says. "When you look at the phylogenetic tree from the virus, it's exactly the same as what the anthropologists have told us."
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References:

EurekAlert. 2013. “Hitchhiking virus confirms saga of ancient human migration”. EurekAlert. Posted: October 21, 2013. Available online: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/uow-hvc102113.php

Learning Dialects Shapes Brain Areas That Process Spoken Language

Using advanced imaging to visualize brain areas used for understanding language in native Japanese speakers, a new study from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute finds that the pitch-accent in words pronounced in standard Japanese activates different brain hemispheres depending on whether the listener speaks standard Japanese or one of the regional dialects.

In the study published in the Journal Brain and Language, Drs. Yutaka Sato, Reiko Mazuka and their colleagues examined if speakers of a non-standard dialect used the same brain areas while listening to spoken words as native speakers of the standard dialect or as someone who acquired a second language later in life.

When we hear language our brain dissects the sounds to extract meaning. However, two people who speak the same language may have trouble understanding each other due to regional accents, such as Australian and American English. In some languages, such as Japanese, these regional differences are more pronounced than an accent and are called dialects.

Unlike different languages that may have major differences in grammar and vocabulary, the dialects of a language usually differ at the level of sounds and pronunciation. In Japan, in addition to the standard Japanese dialect, which uses a pitch-accent to distinguish identical words with different meanings, there are other regional dialects that do not.

Similar to the way that a stress in an English word can change its meaning, such as "pro'duce" and "produ'ce," identical words in the standard Japanese language have different meanings depending on the pitch-accent. The syllables of a word can have either a high or a low pitch and the combination of pitch-accents for a particular word imparts it with different meanings.

The experimental task was designed to test the participants' responses when they distinguish three types of word pairs: (1) words such as /ame'/ (candy) versus /kame/ (jar) that differ in one sound, (2) words such as /ame'/ (candy) versus /a'me/ (rain) that differ in their pitch accent, and (3) words such as 'ame' (candy in declarative intonation) and /ame?/ (candy in a question intonation).

RIKEN neuroscientists used Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) to examine whether the two brain hemispheres are activated differently in response to pitch changes embedded in a pair of words in standard and accent-less dialect speakers. This non-invasive way to visualize brain activity is based on the fact that when a brain area is active, blood supply increases locally in that area and this increase can be detected with an infrared laser.

It is known that pitch changes activate both hemispheres, whereas word meaning is preferentially associated with the left-hemisphere. When the participants heard the word pair that differed in pitch-accent, /ame'/ (candy) vs /a'me/ (rain), the left hemisphere was predominantly activated in standard dialect speakers, whereas in accent-less dialect speakers did not show the left-dominant activation. Thus, standard Japanese speakers use the pitch-accent to understand the word meaning. However, accent-less dialect speakers process pitch changes similar to individuals who learn a second language later in life.

The results are surprising because both groups are native Japanese speakers who are familiar with the standard dialect. "Our study reveals that an individual's language experience at a young age can shape the way languages are processed in the brain," comments Dr. Sato. "Sufficient exposure to a language at a young age may change the processing of a second language so that it is the same as that of the native language."
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References:

Science Daily. 2013. “Learning Dialects Shapes Brain Areas That Process Spoken Language”. Science Daily. Posted: October 18, 2013. Available online: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/10/131018132054.htm