Study: Aboriginal children count without having words for numbers

[marmar]

via Yahoo!:



Aboriginal children 'can count without numbers' Tue Aug 19, 7:08 AM ET



LONDON (AFP) - Australian Aboriginal children can count even without having words for numbers, according to a study by British and Australian experts released Tuesday.

The findings run counter to recently revived scientific claims that children can only count if they know the words for numbers, said the lead author of the research, from University College London (UCL).

The study found that four to seven-year-olds from two Aboriginal communities have an "innate system" to count with, even though their languages only have normal words for one, two, few and many.

"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," said Professor Brian Butterworth of UCL.

"That is, to possess the concept of 'five' you need a word for five," he said, adding that evidence from numerate societies as well as Amazonians whose language does not have counting words have been used to support the claim.

"However, our study of Aboriginal children suggests that we have an innate system for recognising and representing numerosities... and that the lack of a number vocabulary should not prevent us from doing numerical tasks," he said. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080819/sc_afp/sciencebritainaustraliaaborigineslanguage

[SoCalDem]

1. The human brain is pretty amazing..

Book-learnin' is not the sum total of education..
Aboriginal people use geometry when they hunt..even if they don't know what to call it.:)

[mr_hat]

3. So does Billy Bob.

Just to be fair.

[fed_up_mother]

5. I think the average human brain can recognize "sets" up to seven or eight

without counting, so this doesn't seem like too much of a stretch to me.

[LeftishBrit]

6. Actually only 3 to 5 accurately

Though we can make good estimates for rather higher numbers.

[mike_c]

2. although I understand the reasoning behind the original hypothesis...

...I think it's nonsense in several really basic ways. First and foremost because humans are such visual animals, and a large proportion of visual information processing has to do with establishing our own spatial position and the relative positions of other things in our environment. Such comparisons are inherently numerative, expressing distance in quantitative terms. We don't need words to make such comparisons (although we do need a language for discussing them and applying abstract values to them, I think). We innately quantify the world around us all the time. How far is that? How long have you been here? How many can you carry? Relative to the present, when will the female stop riding my ass about the poor state of hut repair?

[JonQ]

4. You could probably count for yourself

up to a point, but you'd have a hard time expressing that information accurately to another person.

Seems odd to me, not having words for numbers.

[LeftishBrit]

7. It's pretty rare for a language not to have words for numbers

Most languages do have words for numbers at least up to 10; though there are some exceptions, like those described here.

There are accurate nonverbal ways of representing numbers, e.g. through showing sets of fingers; though the languages that don't have counting words often don't emphasize other forms of representation of numbers.

These studies show that there are many ways of representing numbers - not just verbal ones. This had already been suggested by studies that show that it's possible for people with severe developmental or acquired language disabilities to be fine with numbers, as well as vice versa. But it's very interesting to have this piece of cross-cultural evidence.

(BTW, one of my ex-students was involved in the early stages of this study. It's not every psychology research assistant who needs to learn basic Warlpiri, and travel around remote areas of Australia, as part of their job - but she seemed to manage remarkably well!)


(edited because I misspelled Warlpiri!)

[bean fidhleir]

8. one, two, many,

many one,
many two,
many many,
many many one,
many many two,
many many many
et seq.

:evilgrin: