Peter Gordon of Columbia University studied the Pirahã and found that they had great difficulty when asked to work with numerous objects. The Pirahã are by no means retarded, however: they have excellent capabilities in other areas such as spatial orientation and linguistics, and clearly understood the task they were asked to do. In this case, the lack of specific words for numbers higher than two made it difficult for them to think about numbers higher than two or three. Even after some of the adults requested math lessons they still couldn’t learn even the most basic mathematical concepts.

Whether or not – and to what extent – our language affects how we think has been debated for over a century. This new research adds another piece of evidence to that argument, as well as to the idea that concepts for which we have no words are harder to think about. This has been seen in other places as well: the Zuni indians, for example, use the same word for orange as for yellow. While they can see the difference between the two colours, they are less likely to remember if a particular object was orange or yellow after a period of time than an English speaker, who codifies the difference between the two colours in the language, does.