Talk:100 doors: Difference between revisions
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The main page currently says: "Since people can only keep seven things (plus or minus two) in their minds at a time, this quickly becomes an intellectual burden." But there is some significant evidence that this issue is related to the native language of the speaker. I do not know keywords to search on to dig out references, but I am remembering that typical chinese speakers can hold ten independent concepts where english speakers can hold six. --[[User:Rdm|Rdm]] 15:58, 3 December 2010 (UTC)
::FWIW and with a lag of 5 years, the 7+/-1 trope goes back to the 1950s and is very much out of date. The particular issue with Mandarin was simply that that the Mandarin integer morphemes are phonetically simpler, and impose a lighter load on the 'acoustic loop' of internal rehearsal, which does seem to have a rather limited capacity. The word "seven" is just phonetically more expensive (3 consonants, two syllables) than Mandarin's monosyllabic first tone 'qi', for example. Mandarin number words simply pack a bit more densely than English in constrained acoustic space. (Cantonese, which has more final
== Output consistency ==
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