Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
Cogn Psychol. 2012 Feb;64(1-2):74-92. doi: 10.1016/j.cogpsych.2011.10.004. Epub 2011 Nov 22.
Language for number is an important case study of the relationship between language and cognition because the mechanisms of non-verbal numerical cognition are well-understood. When the Pirahã (an Amazonian hunter-gatherer tribe who have no exact number words) are tested in non-verbal numerical tasks, they are able to perform one-to-one matching tasks but make errors in more difficult tasks. Their pattern of errors suggests that they are using analog magnitude estimation, an evolutionarily- and developmentally-conserved mechanism for estimating quantities. Here we show that English-speaking participants rely on the same mechanisms when verbal number representations are unavailable due to verbal interference. Followup experiments demonstrate that the effects of verbal interference are primarily manifest during encoding of quantity information, and-using a new procedure for matching difficulty of interference tasks for individual participants-that the effects are restricted to verbal interference. These results are consistent with the hypothesis that number words are used online to encode, store, and manipulate numerical information. This linguistic strategy complements, rather than altering or replacing, non-verbal representations.
语言中的数字是语言和认知关系的重要案例研究，因为非言语数字认知的机制已经得到很好的理解。当对皮拉罕人（一个没有确切数字词的亚马逊狩猎采集部落）进行非言语数字任务测试时，他们能够完成一一对应匹配任务，但在更困难的任务中会出错。他们的错误模式表明他们正在使用类比数量估计，这是一种用于估计数量的进化和发展上保守的机制。在这里，我们表明，由于言语干扰，当言语数字表示不可用时，英语使用者也依赖于相同的机制。后续实验表明，言语干扰的影响主要表现在数量信息的编码过程中，并且——使用一种为每个参与者匹配干扰任务难度的新程序——这些影响仅限于言语干扰。这些结果与数字词在线用于编码、存储和操作数字信息的假设一致。这种语言策略补充而非改变或取代非言语表示。
