Language and thought
LECTURE 1: INTRODUCTION
In this course, we look at the whole population, beyond WEIRD people (western, educated,
industrialized, rich, democratic).
Language versus communications systems
Animals have communication systems, but these are not language.
We have grammar and words, animals don’t
We have written language, animals don’t
Animals are focused on survival, but we are not
There are 3 design features of language (versus communication systems):
1. Combinatorics: the ability to take a finite number of elements to make an infinite number of
new structures (like taking 5 letters and making a lot of different words with it).
2. Displacement: the ability to communicate about things remote in space and time (welcome
to the future).
3. Arbitrariness: no necessary connection between a sound and its meaning (like a whale and
microorganisms).
There are approximately 7000 languages in the world today. Languages are mutually intelligible: the
distinction between language and dialect is often difficult to make.
How do languages differ:
Sound: different amounts of phonemes (= perceptually distinct units if sound in a language)
Tone: a word can have 2 different meanings with the same written word, but it differs
through tone.
Manual modality: languages that don’t use sound, so sign languages. Like American and
British sign language differ.
Meaning: like the distinctions of colors/languages where 2 things are expressed by the same
words. Like in Jahai (Malay Peninsula), they don’t have a general word for ‘to eat’, you have
to choose between 4 categories. And in Punjabi (Pakistan, India) the same word is used for
drink and smoke.
Grammar: the rules for constructing phrases. In English we use the SVO order, but in other
languages case markers are used, and in some even gender systems.
Languages vary at every level: sound, meaning, grammar.
Where does this variation come from?
Language varies because cultures vary. If something is very important in one culture, there will be
more words to describe it, like Hopi with corn and Jahai for smells. These examples show lexical
elaboration where there is a cultural preoccupation. Also biology and environment as determinators.
What consequences does this variation have?
There are several components in thought/cognition: decision-making, problem-solving, reasoning,
memory, perception. Research shows
There is an effect of vowels and consonants on attractiveness of people. Men and women
perceive consonants differently, which affects voice attractiveness.
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, Visual memory is affected by language (research asking question about an event using
different verbs).
Speakers of a tone language (like Cantonese) are better at pitch discrimination, pitch
processing speed and pitch memory than speakers of a non-tonal language like English.
The difference in talking about events influences memory of events. For instance, English and
Spanish differ in how they talk about accidental events (English: she broke the glass, Spanish:
the glass broke itself). Memory was high for intentional events, but for accidental events,
memory in Spanish was lower.
The idea that language influences thought is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This states that the
real world is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. The worlds
in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not just the same world with different labels.
Linguistic determinism: language determines thought. This would mean that pre-linguistic
infants and animals do not have thought. This view is quite strong and not often supported
by researchers these days.
Linguistic relativity: language influences thought.
Thinking for speaking: thoughts are shaped by demands of linguistic code. Even weaker than
linguistic relativity.
The skeptics: the debate is not whether language shapes thought, it’s whether language shapes
thought in some way other than through the semantic information that it conveys. It’s about
whether the structure of language (syntactic, morphological, lexical, phonological) has an effect on
thought. There is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ way of
thinking.
They don’t deny scientific evidence, but rather the interpretation of it. Language dramatically
shapes thought.
Approaches we can use to examine the effects of language on thought:
Does speaking one language versus another affect thinking
- Cross-linguistic comparison
How do different usage patterns of language affect cognition
- Literacy, writing systems (in English we read from left to right, in Arabic we read from right
to left), sub cultures
Does merely have a language influence thinking
- Prelinguistic infants, deaf adults (without exposure to sign language), non-linguistic animals
- Verbal interfering: ask participants to repeat numbers whilst watching a video. This
presents you to use language whilst doing a task.
Does reading direction influence how we think about time?
Yes. Spatialization of time across English and Hebrew differs (Hatching
of chicken experiment).
Horizontal orientation (reading from right to left) appears but
is mostly decorative these days.
Vertical orientation can happen from right to left or from top
to bottom.
How can we study the effect of script direction on thought about time?
There is a correlation between age and arrangement of cards, consistent with changes in writing
conventions.
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, Older people used more Right-left
Younger people used more left-right
So linguistic conventions, such as writing, are strong determinants of how people spatialise time.
There is also a strong relationship between ordering of time and literacy.
LECTURE 2: COLOR
3 questions:
1. How do languages differ in color vocabulary?
2. Does language affect color perception and memory?
3. Do babies have color perception?
Diversity in color language
We use separate labels for each of the colors and we have the intuition that these colors
exist in the world and name the in a language.
Color is continuous: language curs up this continuous color space into categories, because
language is categorical.
Color: electromagnetic radiation in the visible spectrum, also known as visible light. Most
light sources Amit light at many different wavelengths.
Our experience of color is when we perceive differences between light composed of different
wavelengths.
Umpila
A lot of languages have a single term for green and blue. In academic discourse, this is called grue.
Two colors that see some disagreement across languages are green in blue, which in English and
Dutch have 2 separate color words. But some languages collapse them.
- In Japanese, the go light in the traffic light is blue. They declared that traffic lights should be
the bluest shade you can get.
There are languages that make more distinctions that English does not make, like Turkish and Russian
that have 2 different words for light and dark blue. We can recap color space by comparing the color
lexicon across languages. This is a way to look at the color spectrums across languages/cultures, by
visualizing the boundaries of color space in different languages.
- Umpila (Australia) has one word that means white, one that means red, and one for black.
- Siwu (Ghana) has a big red category, but not a big orange or yellow category. And the
boundary between blue and green is different
Are there constraints on the diversity? Can they put their color boundaries anywhere they want?
Berlin and Kay suggested that all languages draw from a limited set of basic color categories. They
compared the basic color terms across languages. There are a lot of ways to describe colors but not
all of them are basic color terms.
Main criteria to determine what a basic color term is
Monolexemic: a single word for blue
Its signification is not included in that of any other color term: every color has only one basic
color term, so a particular one cannot have two.
Its application is not restricted to a narrow class of objects: it must be applicable to almost
anything, to a wide class of objects, so blond and skin color is not included
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, It must be psychologically salient (occur at the beginning of elicited lists; stable reference
(the meanings should be the same for everyone); used by everyone). It should be known by
everyone, and it should mean the same to everyone.
Basic color terms: red, purple, green
3-dimensional color space, Munsell color system: represents how we see color. It’s constructed so
that each 2 adjacent colors in this color representation are always distinct from each other.
Distinguished by:
Lightness (value)
Hue
Saturation (chroma)
- Value goes from top to bottom, 0 is dark, 10 is light.
- The circle is the hues: what we tend to think about as colors. There
are 5 principle hues (red, yellow, green, blue, purple) and 5 hues
halfway between the adjunct principal hues. Within each region, there
are subdivisions. In total 10, so that 100 hues can be given values. .
Two colors of equal value and chroma, on opposite sides of a hue
circle, are complementary colors.
- Chroma goes from the inside to the outside. 0 chroma means the grey
scale, the higher chroma you get, the purer the color gets. With
chroma, there is no maximum. The number
of levels of chroma that exist differs
per color
With 5red-purple, the chroma is highest for
values in the middle. But in 10yellow-red (),
there are lesser chroma distinctions because
in general it is seen as a less bright color.
So for the purple hue, there are 68 colors.
The research
They identified the basic color terms in 20 different languages. Then they gave them a chart with
values and hues, with all colors at a maximum chroma. They asked them to draw the boundaries of
the color term. Then they asked people the best example of that color (what is the greenest green in
this chart?).
Focal color: the best
example of a color
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