Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Language is often depicted as the sine qua non of mathematicalthinking, a view buttressed by findings of language-of-trainingeffects among bilinguals. These findings, however, have beenlimited to studies of arithmetic. Nothing is known about thepotential influence of language on the ability to learn rulesabout the relations among variables (e.g., algebra). To testwhether arithmetic and algebraic thinking differ, Chinese-English bilinguals were trained to solve arithmetic and algebraproblems in either Chinese or English and then tested on newand old problems in both languages. For arithmetic problems,solution times were always longer for English than Chinese; inboth languages, solution times dropped during training; aftertraining, solution times continued to drop for old problems, butreturned to pre-training levels for new problems. In contrast,for algebra problems, solution times did not differ acrosslanguage; solution times dropped during training; aftertraining, gains in speed were preserved for both old and newproblems. These findings suggest that the contribution oflanguage to mathematical thinking may be limited to the areasof mathematics that are learned by rote and not by rule.