ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I examine the development of numeracy in children with specific language impairments (SLI), and offer an account of this development in terms of cognitive function. The studies cited offer a special perspective on a familiar theoretical question: What is the relation between language and thought? It is often suggested that mathematical thinking has a special abstractness and independence of operation. Wood (1988) quoted no less an authority than Einstein:
The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought…. In thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined…the elements are, in my case, visual and some of muscular type …conventional signs and words have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, (p. 182)
