Journal
SCIENCE
Volume 306, Issue 5695, Pages 496-499Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/science.1094492
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Members of the Piraha 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.
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