Geometry skills are innate, Amazon tribe study suggests

Geometry skills are innate, Amazon tribe study suggests

The BBC Reports on the study Flexible intuitions of Euclidean geometry in an Amazonian indigene group

The study investigates perceptions of geometry amongst Mundurucu speakers. The Mundurucu Language is notable in that its vocabulary of numbers stops at 5, and that words for higher numbers are approximate.

The article notes that, the Mundurucu participants outperformed their US & French counterparts in the study, when dealing with lines on the surface of a sphere. This is attributed to the prejudices of those educated in Euclidean Geometry.

This appears to be a follow-up of a study published in 2006, Core Knowledge of Geometry in an Amazonian Indigene Group by most of the same team.
which was reported on by National Geographic in 2006 (Amazon Children "Spontaneously" Understand Geometry)

Neo-Whorfians in the NY Times

Does your language shape the way you think?

An article by Guy Deutscher, adapted from his book "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages", describes the difference between the old whorfian concept that a language constrains the way you think, with the idea that the information that a speaker is obliged to convey in a language necessarily has an effect. He draws a parallel with the intuition and habit born of other social influences.

The article mentions the inconsistency of grammatical gender across different languages, highlights Roman Jakobsen's maxim that "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey."

Includes examples of evidentiality in Matses, and of exclusively non-egocentric geographic coordinates in Guugu Yimithirr and other languages, along with the difficulty that egocentrically oriented people can have in dealing with such a system.