In school, we learn the names of numbers before we learn how to count, add and subtract them, but recently some British and Australian scientists studying indigenous children found that counting is a skill that doesn’t depend on knowing the words for numbers. This may mean that humans have an innate mechanism for math.
In a co-operative study, researchers from University College London and the University of Melbourne found that children from two indigenous Australian communities that do not have words for numbers above three could perform number-related tasks without words. This indicates that humans possess an innate counting mechanism. If so, it is possible that this mechanism might develop differently in children with dyscalculia, which is an impairment in the ability to learn math.
The results of this study fly in the face of current beliefs that children can only count if they know the words for numbers. UCL Professor Brian Butterworth, lead author of the study, says “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.”
How did the researchers test for knowledge of numbers without using words? They devised a series of tasks using auditory clues and asked children to match what they heard with counters representing the numbers. “For example, children were asked to put out counters that matched the number of sounds made by banging two sticks together,” Butterworth explained. “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 — the number of objects in a set –up to nine, even though they lacked number words.”
Butterworth concluded, “Our study of aboriginal children suggests that we have an innate system for recognizing and representing numerosities and that the lack of a number vocabulary should not prevent us from doing numerical tasks that do not require number words.”
