Answer this without counting: Are there more X’s here XXXXXX, or here XXXXX?
That’s a problem facing people whose languages don’t include words for more than one or two. Yet researchers say children who speak those languages are still able to compare quantities. “We argue that humans posses an innate system for enumeration that doesn’t rely on words, “says Brian Butterworth of the institute of cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.
I an attempt to prove it, Butterworth compared the numerical skills of children from two indigenous Australian groups whose languages don’t contain many number words with similar who speak English.
All the groups performed equally well, his research team reports in Tuesday’s edition of proceedings of the National Academy of sciences.
“Basic numbers and arithmetic skills are built on a specialized innate system,” Butterworth said in an interview. Using words for exact numbers id “useful but not necessary,” the researchers concluded.
Co-author Robert Reeve of the University of Melbourne, Australia, agreed: “Our findings are consistent with ideas and the lack of number word sin a language should not prevent us from completing simple number and computation tasks.”
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 include four-and more than three.
In the first test, almost all the children were able to distribute six and nine pieces of play dough among three toy bears. When 7 or 10 pieces were to be shared, the idea of dividing up the extra piece was only figured out by a few of them, and those were older, non-English speakers.
The second was a memory test; various numbers of tokens were placed on a mat and then covered. Children were asked to place the same amount of tokens on their mats. No differences were found in the three groups.
The third tested nonverbal addition. Some counters were placed on a mat and covered. A few seconds later more were placed down and then slid under the mat. The children were asked to match the total number of counters. Several combinations were used including 2+1, 1+4, 4+3, and 4+2.
“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.”
Butterworth’s research was reported by the Leverhulme Trust.
Published in Times Global, August 20, 2008.
