Language, subjective associations, and numerical concepts

Does your language determine what you can think, or does it steer what you pay attention to? Keep that distinction in view. Both accounts examine language and thought, but they test the relationship in different ways.

A begins by challenging Benjamin Lee Whorf. The words “seduced” and “fantastic claims” tell us the author is critical, rather than neutrally reporting his view. Whorf claimed that a person's first language restricts possible thoughts and that differences between Hopi and English impede mutual understanding. The author says there was no evidence for those claims. A lack of evidence isn't itself proof that a claim is false; the next paragraph explains the more specific mistake the author sees.

The alternative is that language makes us attend to certain things, rather than making other thoughts impossible. German's words for neighbor require the speaker to identify the person as male or female. English's word neighbor doesn't require that choice. An English speaker can still think about the neighbor's gender; the language simply doesn't demand that information whenever the person is mentioned. That is the difference between directing attention and limiting what someone can conceive.

Grammatical gender can also influence associations. Picture the same bridge described by German and Spanish speakers. In German the noun is feminine; in Spanish it is masculine. The study finds that Spanish speakers tend toward a stereotypically masculine property such as strength, while German speakers tend toward slenderness or elegance. The bridge hasn't changed. The association the speakers bring to it has.

Clocks and violins show the same pattern. Mountains and chairs give us a useful reversal: these nouns are masculine in German and feminine in Spanish, and the associations reverse too. We aren't just being told that Germans always describe things one way and Spanish speakers another. The pattern follows the grammatical gender of the object in the particular language.

Main point of A: Language influences what speakers attend to and the associations they form, rather than preventing them from thinking particular thoughts.

B turns to numerical reasoning among Pirahã and Mundurukú participants. Their words for small quantities are limited, and they may not be true number words at all. The participants also don't overtly count using words or tallies. Does that mean they have no concept of quantity?

The tests suggest otherwise. Participants compare quantities, construct sets, and perform addition and subtraction tasks in ways that reveal an imprecise, nonverbal sense of number. The important observation is that they possess some numerical understanding without a verbal counting system. That supports an origin for approximate numerical concepts that doesn't depend on language.

But approximate isn't exact. Four objects and five objects are close in quantity; they aren't equal in number. Some participants match those sets or judge that six minus three equals two. Numerate comparison subjects insist on exact equality: two plus two is four, not roughly four. So the finding that people can understand quantity without number words doesn't settle the role of words in exact numerical thinking.

B ends with three possibilities. Learning number words might create the concept of exact equality, help expand a concept already present, or direct attention to that concept. Those are different roles for language, and the author doesn't choose among them. Don't collapse the result into either language creates all mathematical thinking or language has nothing to do with it.

Main point of B: People can possess approximate numerical concepts without a verbal counting system, while number words may help create, develop, or draw attention to exact numerical equality.

The shared issue is what language contributes to thought. A studies differences in attention and subjective associations. B asks which numerical concepts people possess and what role number words might play in that possession.