Is Finger-counting Necessary for the Development of Arithmetic Abilities?

In the literature on numerical cognition, it is generally assumed that fingers play a functional role in the development of a mature counting system (Gelman and Gallistel, 1978; Fuson et al., 1982; Fuson, 1988; Butterworth, 1999a,b, 2005). Indeed, fingers have been assumed to contribute to: (1) giving an iconic representation of numbers (Fayol and Seron, 2005); (2) keeping track of the number words uttered while reciting the counting sequence (Fuson et al., 1982); (3) sustaining the induction of the one-to-one correspondence principle (Alibali and DiRusso, 1999) by helping children to coordinate the processes of tagging (i.e., attribution of a counting word to each item) and partitioning (i.e., isolating the items already counted from those which remained to be counted; Gelman and Gallistel, 1978); (4) sustaining the assimilation of the stable-order principle (i.e., numerical labels have to be enumerated in the same order across counting sequences) by supporting the emergence of a routine to link fingers to objects in a sequential, culture-specific stable order (Wiese, 2003a,b); (5) sustaining the comprehension of the cardinality principle (i.e., the last number word uttered while counting determines the total number of objects in a set) by leading children to always reach the same finger when counting to a specific number (Fayol and Seron, 2005); (6) prompting the understanding of the 10-base numerical system (as on our hands we represent numbers as a sum and/or a multiple of 10); and (7) sustaining the realization of basic arithmetic operations (Baroody, 1987; Fuson and Kwon, 1992; Geary, 1994; Ifrah, 2000).