Instructor: Simge Topaloglu
Date: Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Time: 1:30pm - 3:00pm ET
Format: In-person
How old are you? When you read this question, a certain number (or rather, the linguistic label that your language uses to refer to that number) pops up in your mind. Yet, if you were a speaker of Pirahã (a language spoken in the Amazon basin), this question would not be answerable for you, since Pirahã is famous for lacking number words (instead, it uses imprecise terms like ‘one’, ‘few’ or ‘many’ to talk about quantities). Even in languages that do have number words, one often finds striking differences in how the numbers are encoded. For example, the English number term ‘twenty-six’ does not reveal the internal compositional structure of this number, but in Korean 26 would be called ‘two-ten-six’ and thereby clearly show that this number is composed of two sets of 10 and six units of 1.
It has been claimed that this cross-linguistic variation may have significant effects on how people learn math concepts. As a matter of fact, comparative developmental studies of children who speak languages with number words that either reflect or obscure the decimal numeral system enables us to see how language can help (or hinder) children’s math learning. Anthropological studies on languages without number words, on the other hand, investigate whether speakers of these languages show any differences in mathematical reasoning, allowing us to see whether and to what extent our mathematical knowledge is shaped by our linguistic knowledge. The emerging picture about the relationship between language and number is both complex and interesting; and this presentation will explore the vast body research on this topic, as well as how scientists reason about and devise ways to investigate these questions about human cognition.