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Basic number abilities require suitable language?

Posted by Bayle Shanks at 2:04 AM EST

In what would seem to be a sudden, surprise counterattack by the Whorfian hypothesis, a tribe of otherwise smart people have been discovered whose language doesn’t have words for specific numbers, and where the people have major trouble with the idea of specific numbers of things (even when taught & when trying very hard). The children of the tribe can pick up numbers easily, but the adults don’t.

Constance Holden. Life Without Numbers in the Amazon. Science 2004; 305 (5687) : 1093a (in News of the Week)

More information is in this CNN article.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2004 at 2:04 am by Bayle Shanks and is filed under Language. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Basic number abilities require suitable language?”

  1. Bayle Says:
    August 20th, 2004 at 2:07 am

    Katherine told me about this

  2. Andy Says:
    August 22nd, 2004 at 4:29 pm

    Some discussion on this over at Nature http://www.nature.com/news/2004/040816/full/040816-10.html

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