Gordon Peter
Department of Biobehavioral Sciences, Columbia University, 525 West 120th Street, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Science. 2004 Oct 15;306(5695):496-9. doi: 10.1126/science.1094492. Epub 2004 Aug 19.
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.
毗拉哈部落的成员使用“一、二、多”的计数系统。我想知道，说这种缺乏数字概念语言的人，在没有词汇来编码数字的情况下，是否能够理解更大的数量。这解决了关于语言是否能决定思维的经典沃尔夫假说问题。不同认知要求的数字任务结果表明，数字认知显然受到该语言中缺乏计数系统的影响。数量大于三时的表现非常差，但显示出恒定的变异系数，这表明存在一种类比估计过程。
