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.
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