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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.

homesigners were given a set of objects and asked to use tokens to create a second set containing the same number of tokens as objects. Again, their accuracy dropped significantly above sets of three objects.

Children learn this count list well before they actually understand that "four" refers to four objects rather than three or six, says Michael Frank at Stanford University in California.