Peter Gordon, a Psycholinguist at Columbia University, Studied Brazil's Pirahas

Multiple Choice

Peter Gordon, a psycholinguist at Columbia University, studied Brazil's Pirahas tribe and their use of language. He found they had very few words for time and no words for numbers or numerical ideas. His study, published in the journal Science, found that the Pirahas were incapable of doing basic math, and in fact, they were incapable of learning even the concept of numbers, despite eight months of tutoring. The fact that this tribe of people could not conceive of something for which they had no vocabulary reflects what principle?

A) Linguistic relativity
B) Ambiguous language
C) Ladder of abstraction
D) Linguistic determinism