Answer this without counting: Are there more X’s here XXXXXX, or here XXXXX?
That is a problem facing people whose languages do not include words for more than one or two. Yet researchers say children who speak only those languages still are able to compare quantities.
“We argue that humans possess an innate system for enumeration that doesn’t rely on words,” Brian Butterworth of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London says.
In an attempt to prove it, Butterworth compared the numerical skills of children from two indigenous Australian groups whose languages contain few number words with similar children who speak English.
All the groups performed equally well, his research team reports in yesterday’s edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Basic number and arithmetic skills are built on a specialized innate system,” Butterworth said in an interview via e-mail.
Using words for exact numbers is “useful but not necessary,” the researchers concluded.
Co-author Robert Reeve of the University of Melbourne, Australia, agreed: “Our findings are consistent with the idea that we have an innate system for representing quantity ideas and that the lack of number words in a language should not prevent us from completing simple number and computation tasks.”
Edward Gibson and colleagues in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology are skeptical.
It is a useful research program but does not support the conclusion that the understanding of exact numbers does not depend on language, Gibson said in an interview via e-mail.
Butterworth’s tests involved 13 English-speaking children from Melbourne, 20 Warlpiri-speaking children and 12 who speak Anindilyakwa. All the children were aged 4 to 7.
Warlpiri number words are limited to one, two and many, the researchers said. Anindilyakwa has words for one, two, three — which sometimes includes four — and more than three.
The tests: sharing, memory, non-verbal addition and cross-modal matching.
“Perhaps the most striking result comes from the cross-modal matching task, where the child has to put out the number of counters corresponding to a sequence of auditory events,” Butterworth said. “This cannot be done using visual memory, but requires the child to generate a mental representation that is abstract enough to serve to represent both auditory and visual enumeration.”
But Gibson said, “In order to demonstrate their desired conclusion, the authors would need to evaluate an age group across languages with and without number words, where the participants in the language with number words can succeed in getting close to 100 percent accuracy on the tasks. Then the effects of the absence of number words can be evaluated in the population speaking the language that lacks number words.”
In these tests, however, while all groups of children had more or less similar results, none had 100 percent.
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