Numerical Cognition Without Words: Evidence from Amazonia

By Peter C. Gordon. Science, 2004

935 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Education, Statistics and Probability

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ae0a2e56e2e5c3b565e27c785c89e7245a8a6bd

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Education

In Statistics and Probability

Citations in the corpus

No Innate Number Line in the Human Brain (2011, positive): “…& Keating, 1983; Gallistel & Gelman, 1992; Wynn, 1992; Xu & Spelke, 2000), cross-cultural studies (Dehaene, Izard, Spelke, & Pica, 2008a, 2008b; Gordon, 2004; Pica, Lemer, Izard, & Dehaene, 2004; Wassmann & Dasen, 1994), neuropsychology (Anderson, Damasio, & Damasio, 1990; Butterworth, 1999;…”
Natural Number and Natural Geometry (2011, background): “Is language merely a convenient source of symbols for combining information from the two number systems so as to enumerate entities exactly, or is it necessary for the construction of natural number concepts? Children and adults in remote cultures, whose languages lack words for most numbers, tend t”
Dual-inheritance theory: The evolution of human cultural capacities and cultural evolution (2007, background): “…work using experiments from cognitive science among two Amazonian groups demonstrates tllat growing up with such number systems greatly influences people's abilities in non-linguistic tasks that involve memory and matching, in dealing with quantity and number (Pierre et al., 2004; Gordon, 2005).”
Blinking fractals and their quantitative analysis using infinite and infinitesimal numbers (2007, methodology): “In order to introduce the new methodology, let us consider a study published in Science by Peter Gordon (see [9]) where he describes a primitive tribe living in Amazonia - Pirahã - that uses a very simple numeral system for counting: one, two, many.”
Meaning and compositionality as statistical induction of categories and constraints (2009, background): “Recent evidence even shows that lacking exact number words limits speakers’ ability to reason about exact number ((Frank, Everett, Federenko, & Gibson, 2008); (Everett, 2005); (Gordon, 2004); (Pica, Lemer, Izard, & Dehaene, 2004)).”
One, two, three, four, nothing more: an investigation of the conceptual sources of the verbal counting principles. (2007, positive): “First, he notes that cultures without count lists typically don’t have numerals for set sizes beyond “four” (see also Gordon, 2004, Pica et al., 2004)10.”
Effects of the grammatical representation of number on cognition in bilinguals (2006, background): “Some of the most popular cognitive domains where the effects of language have recently been investigated are: spatial cognition (Levinson, 1996; Levinson, Kita, Haun and Rasch, 2002; Majid, Bowerman, Kita, Haun and Levinson, 2004); numerical cognition (Brysbaert, Fias and Noel, 1998; Gordon, 2004); ”
The Cultural Number Line: A Review of Cultural and Linguistic Influences on the Development of Number Processing (2011, background): “The Pirahã have only three number words: “hói” (one), “hoí” (two), and “aibaagi”/“aibai” (many).”
Core knowledge. (2007, background): “Nevertheless, the Piraha distinguish objects from non-object entities (Everett, 2005), and they track objects with the signature set-size limit (Gordon, 2004).”
How Language Programs the Mind (2016, background): “The case for the influence of language on concept learning is stronger still for concepts whose members do not cohere on any perceptual features, such as the concept of exactly EIGHTEEN (Frank, Everett, Fedorenko, & Gibson, 2008; Gordon, 2004)(3) Thus, words not only carve nature at its joints, but ”
Culture and Cognition (2019, positive): “Recent studies by Pica, Lemer, Izard, and Dehaene (2004) and Gordon (2004) provide strong evidence that this approximate number sense is a psychological universal.”
Monkeys match the number of voices they hear to the number of faces they see. (2005, background): “Convergent evidence demonstrates that adult humans possess numerical representations that are independent of language [1–6].”
New Perspectives on Language and Thought (2012, background): “How then are we to interpret the fact that linguistic number words seem to be crucially implicated in non-linguistic number cognition (Spelke & Tsivkin, 2001a, b; Gordon, 2004)?”