Study of obscure Amazon tribe sheds new light on how language affects perception (fwd)

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Public release date: 19-Aug-2004
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-08/tccu-soo081804.php

Contact: Diane Dobry
dd173 at columbia.edu
212-678-3979
Teachers College, Columbia University

Study of obscure Amazon tribe sheds new light on how language affects
perception

Controversial linguistic hypothesis is supported by Teachers College
(Columbia University) professor's observation of tribe whose language
contains no words for numbers beyond 'one,' 'two' and 'many.'
During the late 1930s, amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf posed the
theory that language can determine the nature and content of thought.
But are there concepts in one culture that people of another culture
simply cannot understand because their language has no words for it?

No one has ever definitively answered that question, but new findings by
Dr. Peter Gordon, a bio-behavioral scientist at Teachers College,
Columbia University, strongly support a "yes" answer. Gordon has spent
the past several years studying the Pirahã, an isolated Amazon tribe of
fewer than 200 people, whose language contains no words for numbers
beyond "one," "two" and "many." Even the Piraha word for "one" appears
to refer to "roughly one" or a small quantity, as opposed to the exact
connotation of singleness in other languages.

What these experiments show, according to Gordon, is how having the
right linguistic resources can carve out one's reality. "Whorf says
that language divides the world into different categories," Gordon
said. "Whether one language chooses to distinguish one thing versus
another affects how an individual perceives reality."

When given numerical tasks by Gordon in which they were asked to match
small sets of objects in varying configurations, adult members of the
tribe responded accurately with up to two or three items, but their
performance declined when challenged with eight to 10 items, and
dropped to zero with larger sets of objects. The only exception to this
performance was with tasks involving unevenly spaced objects. Here, the
performance of participants deteriorated as the number of items
increased to 6 items. Yet for sets of 7 to 10 objects, performance was
near perfect. Though these tasks were designed to be more difficult,
Gordon hypothesizes that the uneven spacing allowed subjects to
perceive the items as smaller "chunks" of 2 or 3 items that they could
then match to corresponding groups.

According to the study, performance by the Piraha was poor for set sizes
above 2 or 3, but it was not random. "Pirahã participants were actually
trying very hard to get the answers correct, and they clearly
understood the tasks," Gordon said. Participants showed evidence of
using methods of estimation and chunking to guess at quantities in
larger set sizes. On average, they performed about as well as college
students engaged in more complex numerical estimation tasks. Their
skill levels were similar to those in pre-linguistic infants, monkeys,
birds and rodents, and appeared to correlate to recent brain imaging
studies indicating a different sort of numerical competence that seems
to be immune to numerical language deprivation. Interestingly, Gordon
noted, while Pirahã adults had difficulty learning larger numbers,
Piraha children did not.

While the Pirahã words for "one" and "two" do not necessarily always
refer to those specific amounts, Gordon also found that members of the
tribe never used those words in combination to denote larger
quantities. In the study, they also used their fingers in addition to
their verbal statement of quantity, but this practice, too, was found
to be highly inaccurate even for small numbers less than five.

The Pirahã language has no word for "number," and pronouns do not
designate number--"he" and "they" are the same word. Most standard
quantifiers like "more," "several," "all," and "each" do not exist. In
general, while containing a very complex verb structure common to many
Native American languages, the Pirahã language does not allow for
certain kinds of comparative constructions. For example, it was not
possible to ask participants whether one group of objects "has more
nuts than the other" because of the lack of that construction in the
Pirahã grammar. Yet, the word they use for "many," which in that
language was derived from a form ob the verb meaning "to bring
together," is distinct from a word that means something like "much."

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Details of the study will appear in the Thursday, August 19, issue of
the journal Science.

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