Daniel Everett described in his book Dont sleep there are snakes the language of an Amazonian tribe (Piraha) which has no words for numbers. This tribe also uses "immediacy of experience" for believing other people. The author also argues that this language is a counter-example to the idea of a language instinct as proposed by Whorf and Chomsky.
Caleb Everett in Numbers and the Making of Us: Counting and the Course of Human Cultures argues, based on the language of the Piraha, that counting is a cultural achievement and not innately laid down in the structure of the brain. On page 274, in "Notes" to the section "6. Quantities in the Minds of Young Children", Caleb E. mentions Piaget as follows:
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- Jacques Mehler and Thomas Bever, “Cognitive Capacity of Very Young Children,” Science 3797 (1967): 141–142. See also the enlightening discussion on this topic in Dehaene, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, particularly as it relates to the work of Piaget. I should mention, however, that an insightful reviewer notes that there have been issues replicating the results of Mehler and Bever with very young children.
A review of Caleb Everett's book is in the New York Times.
Additon:
In the second part of his book, Caleb E. summarizes empirical evidence that people with anumerate languages and human babies have an innate sense to recognize quantities up to 3 precisely, and another innate sense to recognize the larger quantity between two aproximately (like: 16 is more than 8). To connect the two and to start to count needs exposure to language with number words and is a slow process. The approximate number sense is also there in rats, etc.