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Originally published in Science Express on 19 August 2004
Science 15 October 2004:
Vol. 306. no. 5695, pp. 496 - 499
DOI: 10.1126/science.1094492
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Reports

Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia

Peter Gordon

Members of the Pirahã tribe use a "one-two-many" system of counting. I ask whether speakers of this innumerate language can appreciate larger numerosities without the benefit of words to encode them. This addresses the classic Whorfian question about whether language can determine thought. Results of numerical tasks with varying cognitive demands show that numerical cognition is clearly affected by the lack of a counting system in the language. Performance with quantities greater than three was remarkably poor, but showed a constant coefficient of variation, which is suggestive of an analog estimation process.

Department of Biobehavioral Sciences, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA.

E-mail: pgordon{at}tc.columbia.edu

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