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Abstract Assessed the impact of linguistic differences in ordinal number names on children's acquisition and use of ordinal numbers and their understanding of ordinal concepts. Elementary school children (aged 5.4-10.6 yrs) in China and the US performed a series of tasks assessing understanding of ordinal numbers and concepts. The results show differences in the acquisition and use of ordinal numbers corresponding to linguistic differences in ordinal names in their native languages. On tasks assessing children's conceptual knowledge of ordinal relations, a more complicated picture emerged. These results suggest that (1) children induce their language's set of ordinal number names by generalization based on rules sanctioned by early examples, and (2) the relation between ordinal names and ordinal concepts is a complex one, with language only one source of difficulty in understanding ordinal relations. Implications for studies of the relation between linguistic structure and cognitive development are discussed, in particular the possibility that effects of linguistic differences may vary for different levels of development and for different aspects of cognition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Abstract: Numerical cognition encompasses the concepts of quantity ('how many?') and serial order ('which position?'). Yet, although numbers can convey different meanings, a recent imaging study by Fias and coworkers showed that ranking letters in the alphabet is subserved by a cortical network highly similar to that involved in judging magnitudes. In terms of neural processing, quantity and rank might just be two sides of the same coin.