infoneer-pulse:

People need language to fully understand numbers. This discovery – long suspected, and now backed by strong evidence – may shed light on the way children acquire their number sense.

Previous studies of Amazon tribes who lack words for numbers greater than three – or, in the case of the Pirahã, for any numbers at all – had shown that they struggle to understand precise quantities, when numbers are relatively large.

However, it wasn’t clear whether this is because they lacked words for larger numbers, or because they came from a culture that viewed precise numbers as unimportant.

Now Elizabet Spaepen, a psychologist at the University of Chicago, and her colleagues may have settled the question. The team studied profoundly deaf people from Nicaragua who had created their own sign language to communicate.

» via New Scientist