There were also reports of a few languages that didn’t have words for numbers other than (AFAI can remember), one, two and many, and their adult speakers apparently really couldn’t learn basic arithmetic or even reliably distinguish between four and five objects.
Very few studies, very hard to experiment, very many confounding variables, draw your own conclusions about validity. But it is interesting and fun to speculate :-)
As far as I know the issue isn’t close to being settled, and from a glance at your link it doesn’t seem to be a related effect.
See http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-03/color-and-language and http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/news070430-2.html for examples of what I was thinking of. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen discussion about this on LessWrong, if you’re interested enough to search.
There were also reports of a few languages that didn’t have words for numbers other than (AFAI can remember), one, two and many, and their adult speakers apparently really couldn’t learn basic arithmetic or even reliably distinguish between four and five objects.
Very few studies, very hard to experiment, very many confounding variables, draw your own conclusions about validity. But it is interesting and fun to speculate :-)