BILINGUALISM AND COGNITIVE ARITHMETIC

In this chapter we aim to give a taste of the current research in bilingualism and numerical cognition. Far from being an exhaustive review, our chapter is intended to frame the relationship between bilingualism and number processing into a novel perspective, by reporting some of the most recent empirical findings.We will first introduce the topic by focusing more generally on the link between language and number processing. A great deal of our knowledge of numbers is traded, thought and manipulated by means of language. But how essential is verbal language to numerical knowledge itself? Recent studies have tentatively addressed the question by looking at numerical abilities in human populations having a very poor lexicon for numbers. Their results will be briefly outlined before addressing the more specific issue of bilingualism. We will then turn to the field of cognitive arithmetic, which has attracted most efforts and produced most of the studies lying at the convergence between bilingualism and mathematical cognition. As a general principle, basic experimental paradigms and effects that were originally described with monolingual participants were employed to explore arithmetic competence in the first and second languages of bilingual participants.We will end by showing how the introduction of novel experimental paradigms in the last few years promises to challenge the conclusions drawn by previous studies.