Language-specific differences in number conceptualization

Science has a story about a study looking at the differences between English and Chinese speakers and what parts of the brain are activated in participants during number processing/manipulating tasks. Participants involved in number processing/manipulating tasks showed similar brain activation as has been shown during language processing tasks, where activation occurs in visual-spatial areas in Chinese speakers and language-related areas in English speakers. The authors, and several other comments in this article by people like Michael Posner, suggest that this effect is not due to the differences in the languages themselves, but in the way that language is learned across cultures.

My opinion is that I find it hard to believe that the differences between the areas of brain activation in different language speakers is as cut-and-dry as the authors would leave the reader to believe. I can think off the top of my head of several studies using English speakers that have found modality-specific areas of the brain which were activated given a particular linguistic stimulus and context.

I place this study in the area of similar results of language-specific differences demonstrated by manipulating spatial relationships, arguing for the significance in the way written language is learned (e.g., the work by Anjan Chatterjee et al.) While I think these differences are interesting, I believe that focusing on the way that language is learned among different cultures is not primary to how word concepts are grounded in a person's environment. While mutual experiences in perceiving the world is mostly the same for each individual, there are differences in bodily state, physical size and shape, and unfamiliar objects in different environments that all create more interesting differences in grounding word concepts involved in language learning and comprehension than the way written language is taught in itself. For example, consider eating a fruit you have never seen before in a foreign country. Do you peel it, or dig out the seeds before biting into it? I think that if a person learned the word for that particular fruit during his/her childhood then that representation of how to interact with it is bound to the word concept itself.