"Assessing the relationship between Piraha, language, cognition, and culture: What's at stake and how to proceed"

A foundational assumption of many researchers investigating the universals of human language is that many properties of language are independent of the cultural context and the non-linguistic cognitive abilities of the(ir) speakers. But it's not clear that this assumption is warranted. Everett (2005) described the case of the Piraha, an isolated Amazonian tribe who are allegedly characterized by very unusual linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive properties (e.g., finite language, lack of words for numbers and colors, lack of quantifiers). Critically, he argued that all these properties can be accounted for by a general cultural constraint against abstraction. The validity of these claims remains an open question. I will report some initial results from a set of experiments I conducted in collaboration with Mike Frank and Ev Fedorenko during a visit to a Piraha village in January 2007 in order to test some of these claims.