Barner David, Wood Justin, Hauser Marc, Carey Susan
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Sidney Smith Hall, Rm. 4020, 100 St. George Street, Toronto, Ont., Canada M5S 3G3.
Cognition. 2008 May;107(2):603-22. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2007.11.010. Epub 2008 Mar 4.
Set representations are explicitly expressed in natural language. For example, many languages distinguish between sets and subsets (all vs. some), as well as between singular and plural sets (a cat vs. some cats). Three experiments explored the hypothesis that these representations are language specific, and thus absent from the conceptual resources of non-linguistic animals. We found that rhesus monkeys spontaneously discriminate sets based on a conceptual singular-plural distinction. Under conditions that do not elicit comparisons based on approximate magnitudes or one-to-one correspondence, rhesus monkeys distinguished between singular and plural sets (1 vs. 2 and 1 vs. 5), but not between two plural sets (2 vs. 3, 2 vs. 4, and 2 vs. 5). These results suggest that set-relational distinctions are not a privileged part of natural language, and may have evolved in non-linguistic species to support domain general quantitative computations.
集合表征以自然语言明确表达。例如，许多语言区分集合与子集（全部与部分），以及单数集合与复数集合（一只猫与一些猫）。三项实验探究了这样一种假设，即这些表征是特定于语言的，因此非语言动物的概念资源中不存在。我们发现恒河猴基于概念上的单复数区分自发地辨别集合。在不会引发基于近似数量或一一对应的比较的条件下，恒河猴区分单数集合与复数集合（1对2以及1对5），但不会区分两个复数集合（2对3、2对4以及2对5）。这些结果表明，集合关系区分并非自然语言的特权部分，可能在非语言物种中演化以支持领域通用的数量计算。
