Children have innate numeracy

Posted by Todd Kuipers
January 17, 2009

A excellent article from the Economist describes a variety of studies - but primarily one by Brian Butterworth - that show that the ability to count, or more simply, the ability to recognize the number differences in small collections of objects is built in.  From Dr. Butterworth’s paper:

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.

So it would seem that within children there is an ability to recognize numbers, even when the language is not available to describe it - allowing the researchers to conclude that there is a basic ability that is not affected by cultural bias.



Behaviour, Child Development, Methodology, Science

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