Researchers have found a new relationship between counting ability of Tsimane’ individuals and their ability to perform matching tasks that involve numbers up to about 25. The results suggest that in order to think about exact numbers, people need to have a word for that number.

A new study from MIT and the University of California at Berkeley has found a relationship between the counting ability of Tsimane’ individuals and their success at matching tasks that involve numbers up to about 25. The researchers found that most subjects could accurately perform tasks that require matching numbers of objects, but only up to the highest number that they could count to.

The results suggest that in order to represent an exact quantity larger than four, people may need to have a word for that number, says Edward Gibson, an MIT professor of brain and cognitive sciences.

«This finding provides the clearest evidence to date that number words play a functional role in people’s ability to represent exact quantities larger than four, and supports the broader claim that language can enable new conceptual abilities,» says Gibson, one of the authors of the new study.

Berkeley postdoc Benjamin Pitt is the lead author of the paper, which appears today in Psychological Science. Steven Piantadosi, an assistant professor of psychology at Berkeley, is the senior author of the study.

Words count

The Tsimane’ are a farming and foraging society of about 13,000 people in the Amazonian rainforest. Most Tsimane’ children start going to school around age 5, but education levels and counting ability vary considerably. The Tsimane’ language has words for numbers up to 100, and words for numbers larger than that are borrowed from Spanish.

Story Source: Materials provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Original written by Anne Trafton. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.