> The negative impact of English is apparent in a 2014 study comparing 59 English-speaking Canadian children from Ottawa, Canada, with 88 Turkish children from Istanbul, ranging in age from 3 to 41/2 years. The Turkish children had received less instruction in numbers and counting than the Canadians. Yet the Turkish children improved their counting skills more after practicing in the lab with a numbered board game, according to the study, co-written by Jo-Anne LeFevre, director of the Institute of Cognitive Science at Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario. Turkish students learning to count in their native language "mastered it more quickly" than the children learning in English, Dr. LeFevre says.
If I read this literally, they are generalizing from a group of 59 students. Were all of them from one school in Canada and one school in Turkey? Did they repeat the experiment? Other languages?
"Mastered it more quickly" means that the number of turns to get a perfect score by the Turkish children was smaller than the number of turn to get a perfect score by the Canadian children? Or nobody get a perfect score and the Canadian children always got better scores than the Turkish children, but the improvement was bigger in the Turkish children than the Canadian children?
They have children between 3 an 4.5 y.o. (or 41/2 = 10.5?) How did they test all of them. The difference between 3 and 4.5 is very big (and with 10.5 is huge). I'm not sure that my daughter understood numbers as big as 10 when she was 3 years old.
To me, that almost sounds like there's a skill level ceiling that's as far as the numbered board game can take you, and the Turkish children improved more because they were further from the game's ceiling to begin with, because they had received less previous instruction in numbers and counting.