What is the relationship between language and thought? Traditional approaches to this question have staked out extreme positions: either that language determines the shape of the thoughts you can entertain, or else that natural language is only a thin overlay on top of a more basic “language of thought.”
Work in the domain of numerical cognition supports a middle view: that language is a tool that can help with complex cognitive tasks by supplementing core non-linguistic numerical abilities. But if number systems are tools, then the way these tools are structured should make a big difference to how they are used and what they are good for. In this talk, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural evidence from Brazil, India, and Papua New Guinea, will be described showing some of the incredible variation in number representations across the world and how these representations affect the cognition of their users.