Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The ability to represent large exact numbers is unique to humans. On some proposals, this capacity depends crucially onlanguage; learning the count list (”one”, ”two”, ”three”, etc.) allows children to represent the exact cardinality of numberslarger than four. On alternative proposals, this ability depends not on language but on innate pre-verbal counting processes.Here, we conducted a non-verbal test of large exact number concepts in the Tsimane’, an indigenous Amazonian culturein which adults vary widely in their knowledge of the verbal count list. Participants correctly matched the number ofobjects in a response set to the number in a sample set but only for cardinalities that were within their verbal count range.For larger cardinalities, they reproduced sets that were only approximately matched in number. The findings challengeaccounts that posit pre-verbal number concepts and support the Whorfian view that language can enable new conceptualabilities.