Chinese can remember more numbers than Malay since Chinese digit names have shorter pronunciation duration.
In their study, Chan and Elliott tested whether the Chinese’s better performance in digit memory span task was due to shorter pronunciation duration of Chinese digit names or to better visuospatial sketchpad abilities, or both. Eighteen Chinese and 18 Malay Singaporean psychology undergraduates participated in the experiment. All participants went through 3 conditions: No suppression (N-S), Phonological loop suppression (PL-S), and Visuospatial sketchpad suppression (VSSP-S). The order of the conditions was counterbalanced. At each trial, the string of digits was presented both visually and orally to the participant (e.g., digits were read out while the corresponding card containing Arabic digits were shown). After viewing and hearing the numbers, participants recalled them by writing the digit names in their respective language. In the PL-S condition, participants had to repeatedly utter an irrelevant word during the presentation of the digits. In the VSSP-S condition, the participants were shown a set of visual distracters after the presentation of the string of digits. After each trial, the length of the digits that a participant recalled correctly was measured. The result showed that under the N-S condition and VSSP-S condition, the Chinese digit span was significantly larger than the Malay digit span. However, under the PL-S condition, the Chinese digit span was not significantly different from the Malay digit span. These results showed that Chinese participant attained a significantly larger digit span than Malay participants when phonological loop was not suppressed. In other words, they showed no difference in digit span when phonological loop was suppressed by uttering irrelevant word repeatedly. Therefore, this study showed that Chinese outperform their Malay counterparts in digit span task because they have shorter pronunciation duration for digit names not because they have better visuospatial sketchpad abilities.
