The results showed clearly that the children of indegenious communities - who have no words or even gestures for numbers - have numeracy skills equal to native English speaking children. So numeracy is not based on culture or language but probably an innate facility.
Publications:
- Butterworth, B., Reeve, R. (Forthcoming). Verbal counting and spatial strategies in numerical tasks: Evidence from indigenous Australia. Philosophical Psychology
- Butterworth, B., Reeve, R., Reynolds, F., Lloyd, D. (Forthcoming). Numerical thought with and without words: Evidence from indigenous Australian children. Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences of the USA
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These interestign results should probably be contrasted with the finding of Peter Gordon and others, who investigated the numeracy skills of the Piraha˜ and Munduruku´ Amazonian Indians of Brazil, who either have no number System or only word for roughly 1 and 2)
There it was found that: "when tested on a variety of numerical tasks—naming the number of items in a stimulus set, constructing sets of equivalent number, judging which of two sets is more numerous, and mental addition and
subtraction—these subjects gave results indicative of an imprecise nonverbal representation of number, with a constant level of
imprecision."
Thus some kind of number representation system seems to be shared, but having an arithmetic number system significantly alters precise representation of and performance with numbers. So in an imprecise, rough measurement-style of way, children are equal in their numerical capacities. But as Peter Gordon writes in a Language Log Commentary:
"Research in the development of number ability suggests that we are born with the ability to exactly perceive and represent 1 to 3 elements in memory without counting, and that we can approximate larger numbers. This is precisely what you see in the Piraha ([...]. The thing that bootstraps you beyond the small-number exact enumeration, into the realm of 4, 5 and to infinity and beyond, is the language of number. There is no way to do this (at least within the natural bounds of human experience) that does not involve some symbolic representation of exact quantities."
References:
Language and the Origin of Numerical Concepts - R Gelman, CR Gallistel - Science, 2004
http://158.130.17.5/~myl/languagelog/archives/001389.html
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