Journal article
Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children
B Butterworth, R Reeve, F Reynolds, D Lloyd
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | NATL ACAD SCIENCES | Published : 2008
Abstract
Are thoughts impossible without the words to express them? It has been claimed that this is the case for thoughts about numbers: Children cannot have the concept of exact numbers until they know the words for them, and adults in cultures whose languages lack a counting vocabulary similarly cannot possess these concepts. Here, using classical methods of developmental psychology, we show that children who are monolingual speakers of two Australian languages with very restricted number vocabularies possess the same numerical concepts as a comparable group of English-speaking indigenous Australian children. © 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA.
Grants
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Robert Hoogenraad and Mary Laughren, experts in Warlpiri language and culture; Barbara Wilson and Julie Waddy, who provided much-needed assistance and support on Groote Eylandt; Sue McAvoy, Frank Atkinson, and Gina Atkinson for their help and support at Willowra; and Nadja Reiter of the Northern Territory Education Department, who helped us overcome many tricky problems. Edith Bavin helped us in the early stages of the study, and Judi Humberstone contributed to the statistical analyses. We particularly thank the children and adults of the indigenous communities in which we worked, who gave their time freely, patiently, and with good humor. We also thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting that we use Bayesian likelihood ratios to show an absence of difference between numerical response distributions. The research was supported by a grant from the Leverhulme Trust (to B.B. and R.R.).