No numbers required: The study of children from two groups in the Northern Territory found that, though the communities had few words for numbers, they were still able to copy and perform number-related tasks.

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SYDNEY: Having no language for numbers is no barrier to being able to count, according to a new study of Australian Aborigine children from remote communities.

The study of children from two groups in Australia's Northern Territory found that, though the communities had no words or gestures for numbers above two, they were still able to copy and perform number-related tasks.

The findings, detailed in the U.S. journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, hint that humans possess an innate mechanism for counting.

Counting words

Recently, a theory has been revived which claims that 'counting' words are needed for children to develop concepts of numbers above three, said Brian Butterworth lead author of the study and a neuroscientist at University College London in England. "That is, to possess the concept of 'five' you need a word for five," he said.

Evidence for the idea has come from studies of children in numerate Western societies, but also from Amazonian adults whose language does not contain counting words.

To test this concept further, Butterworth's team, including researchers at the University of Melbourne, looked to indigenous Australian populations – some of whom have restricted vocabularies for numbers.

The researchers worked with children aged between four and seven from two indigenous communities. One community is found on the edge of the Tanami Desert about 400 km north west of Alice Springs and speaks Warlpiri; the other lives on Groote Eylandt in the northern Gulf of Carpentaria, and speaks Anindilyakwa.

Both communities have words for one, two, a few and many (in Anindilyakwa there are also rarely used ritual words for numbers up to 20, but children are not familiar with them). The team also worked with an English-speaking indigenous group in Melbourne.

Banging two sticks together

In tests, the children were asked to put out counters that matched the number of sounds made by banging two sticks together. Thus, said Butterworth, they had to mentally link numbers in sounds and in actions, which meant they couldn't rely on sights or sounds alone.

"They therefore had to use an abstract representation of, for example, the 'fiveness' of the bangs and the 'fiveness' of the counters," he said. "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."

Though the idea that counting requires number-specific language has been gaining in popularity in recent years, the new study appears to show that this isn't true.

"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," said Butterworth.