Counting without words for numbers by Zuzana Zelenakova

How could it be counting without numbers? People whose languages contain numerals can´t even imagine that. In fact there are people who don´t have words for more than one or two. However, according to scientists they are able to recognize the quantity. “We argue that humans possess an innate system for enumeration that doesn´t rely on words,” said Brian Butterworth from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London. In order to support this idea Butterworth put in comparison two groups of Australian to be more precise Aboriginal kids who don´t have but few number words with children who speak English. 13 English speaking children from Melbourne, 20 Warlpin speaking and 12 Anindilyakwa speaking children between the age of 4 an 7 were involved. Children run through set of tests including sharing meaning they had to distribute several items among toy bears, memory test where they were supposed to remember various numbers of tokens, and others. “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,” concluded Butterworth. The results of the tests were more or less similar for all the groups of children, but none achieved 100 percent. However, there are also skeptic voices. Edward A. Gibson from the department of brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology does not agree with the statement that the understanding of exact numbers doesn´t depend on language. "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," he said.


related story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20080819/sc_afp/sciencebritainaustraliaaborigineslanguage;_ylt=Au3Z2CFp9F7lI7PrJ5IxE4ys0NUE

by Zuzana Zelenakova for PocketNews (http://pocketnews.tv)

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