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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Core questions
"The relationship between number and language has been a widely debated topic," commented Anna J. Wilson a psychologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. “This new research is highly significant, and related to core questions about human mathematical cognition."
Wilson said that in certain Amazon tribes with just a few numerical words previous work had suggested that only a rough approximation of large numbers was possible, but those results are now challenged by this study of Aboriginal languages.
She added that: "It's possible that Aboriginal cultures have particularly advanced visuo-spatial cognition which they can use to represent up to nine items precisely. This would be a very interesting finding because the normal limit for such a capacity in Western cultures is three items.”
Butterworth's team believe that their finding may help explain why children in numerate cultures with developmental disorder called dyscalculia find it so difficult to learn arithmetic. "Although they have plenty of formal and informal opportunities to learn to count with words and do arithmetic, the innate mechanism on which skilled arithmetic is based may [be faulty]," explained Butterworth.
With University College London
