Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children

2008/08/29 by Brian Butterworth, Robert A. Reeve, Fiona Reynolds +1 · 4 citations
Mathematics · Social Sciences · Psychology · #Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills #Mathematics Education and Teaching Techniques #Reading and Literacy Development

paper · doi:10.1073/pnas.0806045105

openalex publication_date 2008/08/29 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/22

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.

Citations

• An Essay concerning Human Understanding
• Beyond Allegory? Reading Lumpérica's "White" Theater of Linguistic Cruelty

Cited by

• The Pirahã and the cognitive gap in Frege's theorem: Hume's principle without the #
• Squeezing, striking, and vocalizing: Is number representation fundamentally spatial?
• Numeral (linguistics) [wikipedia]
• Numerical cognition [wikipedia]

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