Editorial: Linguistic Influences on Mathematics

For many years, an abstract, amodal semantic magnitude representation, largely independent of verbal linguistic representations, has been viewed as the core numerical or mathematical representation (Dehaene and Cohen, 1995). This assumption has been substantially challenged in recent years (e.g., Miura and Okamoto, 2003; Nuerk et al., 2004, 2005; Dowker et al., 2008; Colomé et al., 2010; Helmreich et al., 2011; Krinzinger et al., 2011; Pixner et al., 2011a,b; Göbel et al., 2014; Imbo et al.; Klein et al.). Linguistic properties affect not only verbal representations of numbers (Seron and Fayol, 1994; Zuber et al., 2009; Pixner et al., 2011a), but also numerical magnitude representation (Nuerk et al., 2005; Pixner et al., 2011b), spatial magnitude representations (Shaki et al., 2009; Helmreich et al., 2011), calculation (Colomé et al., 2010; Krinzinger et al., 2011; Göbel et al., 2014), parity representation (Iversen et al., 2004, 2006; Nuerk et al., 2004), place-value representation (Miura and Okamoto, 2003; for a review, see Nuerk et al.) and even early number acquisition (Sarnecka, this issue). Thus, we postulate that numerical and arithmetic processing are not fully independent of linguistic processing. This is not to say, that in patients, magnitude processing cannot function independently of linguistic processing (e.g., Dehaene and Cohen, 1997), we just suppose, these functions are connected in the functioning brain. So far, much research about linguistic influences on numerical cognition has simply demonstrated that language influences number without investigating the level at which a particular language influence operates. Here we want to distinguish several linguistic levels at which numerical processing may be influenced, according to which we group the articles in our special issue: