Download Psycholinguistics 13

Psycholinguistics 13
Language, Culture, and Cognition
Language, Culture, and Cognition
• Does the language we speak determine the
way we think?
• Language reflects thought. Language is an
instrument used to express thought.
Two opposing view of Ancient Greek Rhetoric
• Plato: Rhetorical theory should emphasize
thought, truth, wisdom: language is
therefore the expression of truth.
• Aristotle:
Rhetorical
theory
should
emphasize eloquence and form ---i.e.
language and the techniques of effective
presentation.
The Whorfian Hypothesis
• Language shapes thought patterns.
• Linguistic determinism: a language
determines certain nonlinguistic cognitive
processes.
• Linguistic relativity: cognitive processes
that are determined are different for
different languages.
Whorfian examples (Lexical)
• Differentiation: the number of words in a given
domain in a lexicon. A more highly differentiated
domain has more words, some of which express
finer distinctions. E.g. Eskimo words for snow.
• Whorf suggested that the difference in
differentiation can lead to differences in thinking,
because when we encounter a particular word on a
regular basis, it may influence our habitual
thought patterns.
Whorfian Examples (Grammatical)
• Grammatical characteristics vary from language to
language: In /English, lightening and spark are nouns,
though they are temporary events. In Hopi, lightning
is a verb because events of brief duration must be
verbs.
• Count nouns (with definite outlines) vs. mass nouns
(without clear boundaries). In English pluralized form
of mass noun is: count noun + of + mass noun. That
leads to think of objects as being “containers” (form)
that hold “contents” (substance). Therefore English
speakers think of objects as consisting of form and
substance.
Problems with the Whorfian Hypothesis
• Whorf
discussed
many
linguistic
distinctions but provided no real evidence
of their cognitive consequences.
• We need to assess language and cognition
independently of each other, and in
particular,
cognitive
processes
independently from the linguistic features.
Testing the Whorf Hypothesis
• Differences in languages: compare a language that
linguistically marks a particular conceptual
distinction with a language that does not, or compare
two languages that mark the same distinction in
different ways.
• Differences in thinking: mainly habitual thought,
routine ways of attending to objects and events,
categorizing them, remembering them and even
reflecting upon them. Habitual thought is contrasted
to special thought, cognitive routines restricted to
certain subgroups within a culture (e.g. intellectuals)
Lexical influence on cognition
• Codability: Brown defined it as the length of a
verbal expression. The more words are needed for a
phrase, the less codable the phrase is.
• Zipf’s law: the length of a word is negatively
correlated with its frequency of usage. The more
frequently a word is used in a language, the shorter
the word (either in phonemes or syllables).
• Color naming test (Lenneberg) showed that colors
with long names were named with hesitation, with
disagreement from one person to another.
• The presence of a brief verbal expression in a
language influences certain cognitive processes.
Basic color terms
•
•
•
•
consist of only one morpheme
are not contained within another color
are not restricted to a small number of objects
are drawn from a hierarchy of 11 terms:
Purple
Black 
White
Red

Yellow
Green

Blue

Brown
 Pink
Orange
Gray
Focal Colors
• the most representative example of various
basic colors.
• Focal colors are more perceptually salient
than nonfocal colors and this salience, in
turn, influences the codability and
memorability of a color.
Dani color terms
• Dani, a New Geunea people whose
language consists of only two color terms—
black and white. Rosch (1972) tests color
naming on Dani and Americans: although
Americans performed bettwe on the whole,
both groups’ memory for focal colors was
better than for nonfocal colors. Dani learn
and remember colors much as we do.
Tarahumara color term test
• Tarahumara, a Mexican Indian language that has a single
term for the blue-green color but not separate terms for
blue and green. Kay (1984) tested Tarahumara and
English speakers on color term naming, one chip of blue,
one chip of green, the third of blue-green.
• Results: English speakers distinguished them either blue
or green while Trahumara speakers named them bluegreen. If English speakers were induced to call the
intermediate ship both blue and green, the effect
disappeared. The perception of colors appears to be
dependent on the terms we use to refer to them.
Linguistic and perceptual factors both influence color
cognition.
Number terms
• Morphological difference in number names between Asian
languages and English may influence children’s conceptualization
of numbers and mathematic achievement.
• Chinese and English systems are more similar in naming 1 to 10
and beyond 99. But Chinese naming system is simpler in naming
11 to 99 (decade name plus unit name) while English is more
irregular (from 13 or 19: unit name + decade name, from 20 to 99:
decade name + unit name).
• Chinese preschoolers are no better than American preschoolers at
counting between 1 and 10 or beyond 99 but are better at counting
between 11 and 99. Chinese well documented mathematic
achievement may has something to do with this.
Grammatical influences on cognition
• Form perception
• Navaho: the form of the verb for handling an
object varies with the form or shape of the object.
The verb varies if the object is a long flexible
object versus a long rigid object or a flat flexible
object.
• Carroll’s test showed that the Navaho children did
group the objects on the basis of form at an earlier
age than the English-speaking children.
Counterfactual Reasoning
• Chinese does not have a specific counterfactual form.
• Sentence: If I am the US president, then I will think
before I speak.
• (Bloom): Chinese speakers must integrate their
previous knowledge with the initial premise (I am the
US president), and then negate this premise before
relating it to the if/then statement.
• Reasoning: If A, then B; I know that A is not true;
but if it were, then B would be true.
• Prediction: Chinese speakers would make more
errors in counterfactual reasoning than English
speakers.
Bloom’s Test
• Testing story: A Greek philosopher did not know
Chinese, but if he had, he would have been
influenced by Chinese culture and logic.
• Version 1: counterfactual—if he had known
Chinese, he would have integrated the best
features of Greek and Chinese systems.
• Version 2: noncounterfactual—he did not read the
Chinese works, but they were translated for him.
The story was incoherent unless one made a
counterfactual interpretation.
Bloom’s Test
• Findings:
• Version 1: 98% of American students and 6% of
Chinese
students
interpreted
the
story
counterfactually.
• Version 2: 59% of the Chinese and 96% of the
Americans interpreted the story counterfactually.
• Conclusion: The presence or absence of explicit
marking of the counterfactual in one’s language
influences the facility with which one uses this
mode of thought.
Challenges
• Au (1983,1984): Bloom’s stories were not suitable
for native speakers of Chinese. His revised versions
led to much better performance.
• Bloom questioned Au’s participants who were
bilinguals and test materials that were too simple.
• Liu (1985) conducted a test on monolingual Chinese
(Grade 4 to Grade 11) using both abstract and
concrete stories and found no support of Bloom’s
conclusion but a strong developmental trend in the
ability to reason counterfactually (from 20% correct
in Grade 4 to 80% correct in Grade 11).
Cognitive Representation of Number
• Semantic features of noun phrase: animacy and
discreteness. There are three groups: + animate
(dog), -animate + discrete (shovel), -animate –
discrete (mud)
• In English, plural is obligatorily applied to the first
two groups, but not to the third.
• In Yucatec, a Mexicon Indian language, plural is
applied to the first group, but not to the other two.
• English speakers are supposed to be more
sensitive to shape while Yucatec speakers to
substance.
Cognitive Representation of Number
• Test 1: participants described the picture scenes in
their life. There were no differences between speakers
in the frequency with which they specified the number
of animate beings or nondiscrete substances.
• Test 2: participants were presented with three objects
and asked to judge which two were most similar. E.g. a
cardboard box, a plastic box, and a piece of cardboard.
English speakers regarded two boxes as most similar
while Yucatec speakers regarded the piece of
cardboard as most similar to the cardboard box. This
followed the linguistic classifications for each
language.