Article: Learning Chinese Pays Dividends: Of Characters and Cognition

From http://asiasociety.org/education-learning/chinese-language-initiatives/learning-chinese-pays-dividends-characters-and-cogni

Learning Chinese Pays Dividends: Of Characters and Cognition
By Yi Zheng and Chris Livaccari
February 25, 2011

“Yi, er, san . . .” A Chinese language student counts each stroke while writing the Chinese character for “big”, 大. This seems like a simple process, but new evidence suggests that studying Chinese and learning to write Chinese characters may train a whole array of cognitive abilities not utilized by the study of other languages and writing systems.

A BBC News article, “Chinese ‘Takes More Brain Power’” reported on a study conducted by researchers from the Wellcome Trust in the UK which found that “people who speak Mandarin Chinese use both temporal lobes of their brain to understand the language.” This is very different than English-language speakers who use only the left temporal lobe (June, 2003). The difference is evident because speakers of Chinese “use intonation to distinguish between completely different meanings of particular words.”

Read more about different studies supporting a connection between cognition and learning Chinese at http://asiasociety.org/education-learning/chinese-language-initiatives/learning-chinese-pays-dividends-characters-and-cogni