Amazon tribe shows how language moulds the way we think
The Piraha indians, with a population of less than 200 living along the banks of the Maici River in Brazil, have no concept of precise amounts and words such as “more”, “all” and “each” do not exist in their language. Although they can count to “one” and “two”, the word for “one” tends to refer to “roughly one” or a small quantity. Any number beyond two is translated as “many”.
The new research, reported yesterday in the journal Science, showed that the Piraha’s inability to count had a major impact on the way they perceived the world.
When asked to perform simple matching tasks they responded accurately with two or three items, but struggled with eight to 10.
A researcher would, for instance, set out an array of objects on one side of a stick. The Piraha subject would be expected to respond by laying out the same number of AA batteries in a line on the other side. As the number of objects increased, the task became more difficult and finally impossible.
The tribe members also had difficulty differentiating between an image of four fish and an image of five fish. They did better when the objects they were asked to match were arranged in an uneven pattern. Then their performance improved when numbers were increased to seven to 10.
Biobehavioural scientist Dr Peter Gordon, who led the research, thinks the uneven spacing made it easier for items to be perceived as smaller “chunks” of two or three objects which could then be matched. Dr Gordon, from Columbia University in New York, said the Piraha volunteers were trying very hard to succeed, and clearly understood the tasks.
The findings lend support to a controversial theory linking language and perception first put forward in the 1930s.
Amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf suggested that language can determine the nature and content of thought. The hypothesis implies there are concepts that individuals cannot entertain because of the language they speak.
But experts have generally assumed that there would always be some way of capturing a concept’s equivalent meaning in any language.
