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Language and thought
Relationship of cognition and language
• Categories of cognition are shaped by language
– Sapir and Whorf’s linguistic relativity
• Cognitive categories develop independently of language both in
evolution and in ontogeny, language only builds upon these
– Piaget: cognitive development leads language development
• Language and cognition are independent
– Chomsky
• Cognition follows its own path, but language modulates its categories
Early experiments
1.
language = thought
Behaviorism
•
Watson, 1913: thought =
subvocal speech
2. language ≠ thought
•
Smith et al., 1947: curare
experiment: muscle relaxant
Political correctness
“language use has an effect on the way we think”
• euphemisms in politics
– Pacification/pacifikáció = bombázás
– Revenue increase/bevételnövelés = adó
– Rationalisation/munkaerő-gazdálkodás = elbocsátások
• social movements: sexist/racist etc. language is
responsible for sexist/racist etc. thinking
– chairman → chairperson
– Gypsy → Roma (?)
– blind → with visual impairment
• Orwell, 1984: Newspeak
Language shapes the mind
• linguistic determinism: a language shapes
psychological mechanisms
• Benjamin Lee Whorf
• Language shapes the mind, world view, structure of science
• Differences in lexical (vocabulary) and grammatical organization
result in different conceptual schemes
Whorf: linguistic determinism and relativity
• Linguist and engineer, student of anthropologist Edward
Sapir
– Studied native American cultures and languages
– Emphasized the variety and differences of cultures,
not the common features
• Strong view: all higher forms of thought build on
language
• Weak view: the structure of the language one generally
uses influences the way they understand their
environment and act upon in it
Linguistic relativity
(the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)
• Follows from linguistic determinism
• Linguistic relativity: distinctions encoded in one
language are unique to that language alone, and "there
is no limit to the structural diversity of languages”
– It is impossible to translate precisely from one language to
another
• lexical and grammatical relativity
Lexical influences
• Lexical level: what words are found in a given language,
and what they refer to
– different languages carve up the world in different ways
through more or less specialized vocabularies
– languages differ with respect to how they divide up the world
into nouns and verbs
• lightning: a N in English, but a V in Hopi
– duration an important feature
• Tzotzil Mayan: eat-mushy; eat-a-slender-shape-food, eatmeat
– the properties of objects are incorporated into the
verbs
Grammatical influences on thinking
• Number category
– whether inanimate nouns can be pluralized or not
– in English any noun can be pluralized as long as the
referent is discrete, i.e., mass nouns such as paper,
flour cannot be pluralized
• count nouns such as pen, girl
– in Yucatec, only animate nouns can be pluralized
– Lucy (1992): English speakers specify the number of
objects in descriptions of line drawings more
frequently than Yucatec speakers
Grammatical influences
• Tense markers
– determine location of events in time
• past ---------- now ---------- future
– he is running
– he ran
– he will run
WARI in Hopi
• How does a temporal language compare to a
“timeless language”?
Tense
• Hopi distinguishes between
– Reportive: report of a recent or ongoing event
– Expective: report of an expected event (past or future)
– Nomic (not described)
• According to Whorf these are not tenses because
they reflect the epistemic validity of the statement
rather than its duration or location in time
Potawatomi inclusive and
exclusive pronouns: we
(www.potawatomilang.org)
Hungarian object agreement
• The verb form signals the specificity of the
object
– Megevett egy almát.
– Megette az almát.
Hungarian locatives
Static
Goal
Source
Interior
(3D)
BAN
BA
BÓL
Exterior
(2D)
N
RA
RÓL
HOZ
TÓL
Approximate NÁL
(dimension
neutral)
Examples
1.
2.
3.
4.
snow
colours
gender
spatial language
Snow
Eskimos have many different words for ‘snow’
→ evidence that they see snow differently
(urban legend!)
→ Boas, (1911): 4
•
•
•
•
aput („snow on the ground”)
gana („falling snow”)
piqsirpoq („drifting snow”)
qimuqsuq („a snowdrift”)
→ Sapir& Whorf, 1940: 7
→ 1978: 50
→ 1984 (New York Times): 100
The truth about snow
• There are several Eskimo languages + Eskimo languages differ in
the number of expressions they have for snow
• Definition of “word” is problematic
– Inuit is a polysynthetic language: are words derived from the same stem
different or not?
• More importantly
• Even if it was true that one language had more, is it evidence that
they see snow differently?
painters: paints
ornithologists: birds
Colors
Basic colour terms
(Berlin & Kay, 1969)
• Properties
–
–
–
–
1 morpheme
Not restricted to one class of items (e.g. blond)
Do not belong to the scope of another color terms (e.g. torqoise)
Frequently and generally used
• Basic color terms are chosen from 11 colors by all languges: black,
white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, pink, purple, orange, grey.
• languages differ in how many basic color terms they have (Hungarian
for ‘pink’ rózsaszín is not a basic color term)
• 2 colour terms (mili-mola): Dani, New Guinea
• There seems to be a universal hierarchy of
colour categorisation.
black
white
red
green
yellow
blue
brown
purple
pink
orange
grey
Do speakers of different languages see
colors differently?
• Color categories are not arbitrary!
• Same everywhere:
– light
– Operation of the human eye
• 3 kinds of cones in color perception
→ these determine what we see
• Experiments (pl. Heider, 1972 – the
dani): recalling and discrimination is
good for colors—focal colors
Experimental results
(pl. Heider & Oliver, 1972; Rosch, 1978, Berlin & Kay 1969,
Kay & Kempton 1984)
• People speaking different languages choose the same
shade as best exemplars of a category (focal colours)
– The best exemplar of grue in grue languages is the same as the
best exemplar of green in green-blue languages
• Dani do as well as English speakers in non/verbal colour
discrimination and memory tasks
• In a free categorization task, different speakers use
different categories (those marked in their languages)
Winawer et al 2007
• English and Russian speakers
– Russian: dark blue/light blue distinction
• A blue shade shown, then two blue shades
• Task: which of the two is the same shade as the probe?
• Russian speakers:
faster RT if the two
shades are from
different linguistic
colour categories
Gilbert et al 2006
• If language affects perception,
the effect should be stronger
for the right visual field
• Task: Which side is the
different shade on?
• Variables:
– shade difference across or within
linguistic category (blue-green)
– Target in left or right visual field
• Results: when different
linguistic categories, faster
response in RVF
Korean locatives
(Bowerman & Choi 1994, 2001)
Korean locatives (Bowerman, 1996)
• Korean (vs. English and Hungarian): no linguistic distinction, between
placing an object in a container or on a surface (in vs. on, -ban vs. -on)
• Korean language distinguishes between tight fit (ring on a finger,
picture on the wall) and loose fit (fruit in a bowl, object leaning against
a wall)
– This distinction holds for both containment (in) and support (on)
• Experiments
– English/Korean babies differentiate all potential spatial distinctions
– As a results of acquiring a language certain spatial distinctions
(those strengthened by language) become salient in representation
Navajo shape classifiers
• Carroll and Casagrande: Navajo vs. English
– Navajo verbs change form according to the shape of the
object it takes (shape classifiers)
• flexible vs. rigid; flat vs. round
– give blue rope and yellow stick and ask which of the two a
blue stick can go with
• Navajo choose shape: yellow stick
– English choose color: blue rope
– conducted the test with upper class Bostonians
• responded like Navajo children
– there is other kinds of determinism than just linguistic
determinism
Grammatical gender and object perception
Experiment(Boroditsky & Schmidt, 2003)
– Spanish, German and English speakers (experiment language:
English)
– Training: 24 pairs of object - name
apple – Paul / Paula
bench – Eric / Erica
clock – Karl / Karla
– Test: object word shown, name has to be recalled
apple – ?
bench – ?
clock – ?
Results
– For Spanish and German speakers, better recall performance for
pairs where the gender of the name corresponds to the gender of
the object word
Spatial reference (Brown 2001)
• Ego-centric (left, right, in front of me, behind me) –
relative
• Intrinsic (left of the object, in front of the object, etc)
• Geocentric (hill-wise, sea-wise, etc) – absolute
Relative
right
back
left
front
Intrinsic
back
right
left
front
Absolute
West
South
North
East
Tzeltal
• Left „xin” and right „wa’el”
– Refer to body parts only
• Absolute reference system:
– „alan”: downhill ~North
– „ajk’ol”: uphill ~South
– Indoors, outdoors
Experiments
• Dutch + Tzeltal speakers (Bowerman,
Levinson)
–
–
Seated at talble in a room, shown a pattern
Turned 180 degrees, asked to reproduce pattern
Chips task
Chips task - results
Maze task
Maze - results
Evidence for Relativity?
• Li & Gleitman (2002)
– Response depends on environment: the availability of
reference points
• Compare cities/varied landscape vs. open landscape
– In a darkened room (no visible reference points), English
speakers also use the absolute reference frame
Reference frames and ecological
conditions