Number words 'not needed for kids to count'
Tuesday, 19 Aug 2008 08:32
Aboriginal children do not need number words to count
Science In Focus
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Children may not need to know words for numbers to be able to count, scientists have claimed.
A joint UK and Australian study has shown Aboriginal kids can carry out number-related tasks despite having no words or gestures for numbers.
Researchers claim the findings, published in the PNAS journal, suggest that we possess an innate mechanism for counting, which may develop differently in children with dyscalculia – the maths equivalent of dyslexia.
Children aged four to seven from two indigenous communities in Australia – one in the Tanami Desert, 400km north-west of Alice Springs and another at Groote Eylandt in the Gulf of Carpentaria – took part in the study.
Their own dialects of Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa have words for one, two, few and many but other numbers cannot be expressed, even with gestures.
Professor Brian Butterworth of University College London's institute of cognitive neuroscience said special tasks were developed to test the children's ability to count.
"Children were asked to put out counters that matched the number of sounds made by banging two sticks together. Thus, the children had to mentally link numerosities in two different modalities, sounds and actions, which meant they could not rely on visual or auditory patterns alone.
"They had to use an abstract representation of, for example, the fiveness of the bangs and the fiveness of the counters. We found that Warlpiri and Anindilyakwa children performed as well as or better than the English-speaking children on a range of tasks, and on numerosities up to nine, even though they lacked number words."
Prof Butterworth explained that basic numerical concepts appeared to depend on 'innate mechanisms'.
"Recently, an extreme form of linguistic determinism has been revived which claims that counting words are needed for children to develop concepts of numbers above three. That is, to possess the concept of 'five' you need a word for five. Evidence from children in numerate societies, but also from Amazonian adults whose language does not contain counting words, has been used to support this claim," the academic continued.
"However, our study of aboriginal children suggests that we have an innate system for recognising and representing numerosities – the number of objects in a set – and that the lack of a number vocabulary should not prevent us from doing numerical tasks that do not require number words."