Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia

Several videos depict Pirahã children and adults engaging in everyday activities. There are also depictions of pilot experimental tasks. Most of these are not the actual data collections reported in Gordon (2004). However, some of the videos depict elicitations of numerical quantities by Keren Everett, and these are included in the Supplementary Online Materials in Gordon (2004) and are briefly described in the paper. Abstract from Gordon (2004): 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.