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In other words, does the language of school instruction affect the mental number line in children who are otherwise having similar cultural and educational experiences? Number line Ramoplanin estimation tasks do not form part of the teaching syllabus in Wales, meaning children's performance in this task should be largely immune to teaching effects. Additionally, we wished to assess and compare the children's general arithmetical ability and their numerical transcoding abilities: their ability to read and write two-digit numbers. The performance of 20 Welsh-medium and 20 English-medium children was compared regarding the British Abilities Scale (BAS) Number Skills test, writing to dictation, reading numbers aloud, and a non-verbal line estimation task, which included number lines from 0�C20 and 0�C100. We predicted that the Welsh-medium children would score higher on the number line estimation tasks, and that this would be especially true of the number line from 1 to 100, as this places greater demands on the ability to represent multi-digit numbers, for which a transparent counting system would provide an advantage. On the basis of Dowker et al.'s (2008) findings about Welsh-medium children's better performance on two-digit number comparison, we also predicted that the Welsh-medium children would perform better on the tasks involving reading and writing numbers. However, we predicted that there would be no difference between the two groups in BAS Number Skills test performance, based on Dowker et al.'s (2008) earlier findings and their suggestion that linguistic effects on mathematics may be specific rather than global. Method Ethical approval Ethical approval for this study was obtained from Oxford University's Central University Research Ethics Committee. Participants Forty children, drawn from the Year Two classes of two state primary schools in Cardiff and one state primary school from the Rhondda Cynon Taf area, took part in the study. The data from all participants were included in the analysis. Written consent was obtained from all parents or guardians. One Cardiff-based school taught through the medium of Welsh, from which 20 children (10 girls) took part. The other two schools were English-medium schools, and 10 participants from each school (20 in all, including 14 girls) took part. All the children in the Welsh- medium schools were taught exclusively through the medium of Welsh, but 13 of the 20 children spoke English as a first language. Though taught through different languages, mathematics teaching followed exactly the same curriculum in the three schools. The 20 Welsh-medium children were compared with the 20 English- medium children. All were tested at the same time of their school year, but they turned out to be somewhat different in age. The mean age of the Welsh-medium school pupils was 6 years and 5 months (SD = 0.