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Published Online August 19, 2004
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1094492

Reports

Submitted on December 9, 2003
Accepted on July 29, 2004

Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia

Peter Gordon 1*

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

* To whom correspondence should be addressed.
Peter Gordon , E-mail: pgordon{at}tc.columbia.edu

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 3 was remarkably poor, but showed a constant coefficient of variation, which is suggestive of an analog estimation process.


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Science. ISSN 0036-8075 (print), 1095-9203 (online)