Language & Thought
Lecture 1
Main question: what is the relationship between LANGUAGE & THOUGHT?
Different languages different ways of thinking
Language vs. Communication Systems
Animals have communication systems. E.g. monkeys giving different signals of
danger. Is this communication? it has been found that they signal less when there
are no monkeys around. BUT this is not language.
Some features of language
1. Combinatorics. Finite number of elements infinite number of new structures.
2. Displacement. Being able to communicate about things remote in space & time
(we can talk about things that don’t exist, things that can happen anytime, etc.).
Sets us apart from animal communication.
3. Arbitrariness. No necessary connection between a sound and its meaning.
Helps to avoid confusion.
There are approximately 6500 languages in the world today that are distinct from
each other. Many languages are on the risk of distinction due to the fact that people
are switching to more common languages (e.g. English). Especially Africa & the
south of Asia have a lot of languages.
Sound varies
Rotokas (Papua New Guinea) vs !Xóõ (Botswana)
11 phonemes 100+ phonenemes
o Phoneme = perceptually distinct unit of sound in a language. So, languages
differ in the number of phonemes.
British Sign Language vs. American Sign Language
o Sign languages don’t need sound & differ from each other.
Meaning varies
Languages differ in the ways they refer to colors. E.g. English has 11 colors,
other languages can have only 3 colors.
The way we describe actions & events can also differ across languages.
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,Grammar varies
Rules for combining words & places. E.g. in English: John fed the cat vs. The cat
fed Jon. In other languages word order does not always matter.
Grammatical gender
The cat de kat die Katze
The dog de hond der Hund
The house het huis das Haus
So, languages vary
Languages differ in:
- Sound
- Meaning
- Grammar
Where does this variation come from?
Perhaps languages vary because cultures vary.
What consequences does this variation have?
Where does this variation come from?
Difference in language can covary with differences in culture.
o Hopi terms for corn are very broad because corn is very important there.
o Jahai terms for smell are very broad. So, preoccupation with smell results
in a very elaborate lexical in regard to smell.
These examples show lexical elaboration where there is a cultural preoccupation.
What consequences does this variation have?
Language influences thought.
Thought decision-making, problem-solving, reasoning, memory, perception.
Perfors (2004).
Does the sound of a name affect the perceived attractiveness?
A front vowel (tongue in the front of the mouth) is more attractive for men.
A back vowel (tongue in the back of the mouth) is more attractive for women.
Also known as sound symbolism.
Loftus & Palmer (1974).
They let people watch a video of 2 cars & asked a question about the event with
different verbs (smashed, collided, bumped, hit, contacted). The type of verb used
influenced the perceived fastness of the car (e.g. smashed > hit). 1 week later ‘did
you see any broken glass?’. More times ‘yes’ when a more intense verb was used.
Conclusion: visual memory is affected by language.
Fausey & Boroditsky (2011).
English & Spanish speakers differ in how they talk about accidental events.
o English she broke the glass
o Spanish The glass broke itself
English people recall the agent better in accidental events due to the fact that
Spanish people don’t use an agent while talking, which influences their memory of
events. So, the difference in talking about events influences the memory of events.
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,Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Edward Sapir & Benjamin Whorf
Speakers of different languages should have different worldviews.
“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of
social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the
particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It
is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of
language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific
problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’
is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No
two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the
same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct world, not
merely the same world with different labels attached.” – Sapir (1929)
Linguistic determinism (strong view)
Language determines thought.
If you don’t have the words to describe something, you can’t think it.
Linguistic relativity (weak view)
Language influences thought.
Thinking for speaking
Thoughts shaped by demands of linguistic code.
The skeptics
“… the issue here is not about whether language can have an effect on thought.
Of course it can. (if it couldn’t, why would you be reading this?). Nobody doubts
that language can inform, convince, persuade, soothe, dismay, encourage, and
so on. This is what language is for. It is clear that much of the content of our
minds exists because of information conveyed through the medium of language.
Without language there would be no quantum physics, constitutional democracy,
or professional sports.”
“The debate, as we see it, is not whether language shapes thought – it is
whether language shapes thought in some way other than through the semantic
information that it conveys. That is, the interesting debate is over whether the
structure of language – syntactic, morphological, lexical, phonological, etc. – has
an effect on thought.” – Bloom & Keil (2001)
“The discussions that assume language determines thought carry on only by a
collective suspension of disbelief... there is no scientific evidence that language
dramatically shape their speakers’ way of thinking.” – Pinker (1994)
“But the wonder is how in all of their diversity, languages convey the same basic
humanity. The cultural aspects qualify as scattered decoration.” – McWhorter
(2014)
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, Language Thought
Three different approaches to examine the effect of language on thought:
1. Does speaking one language versus another affect thinking?
2. How do different usage patterns of language affect cognition?
3. Does merely having a language influence thinking?
Cross-linguistic comparison.
o Color perception do English speakers perceive colors differently than other
speakers?
Literacy.
o Writing systems. Left to right or
right to left?
Sub-cultures (e.g. professions).
Prelinguistic infants
Deaf adults (without exposure to sign language)
Non-linguistic animals
Verbal interference (“819791”)
Literacy
Does reading direction influence how we think about time?
o In English, we read from left to right. Events would also be described from left
to right (early events on the left, latest events on the right).
o In Hebrew, people read the other way around. Therefore, they also describe
events from right to left (early events on the right, later events on the left).
o Chinese people used to read from top to bottom & right to left (vertical
orientation). The reading direction changed overtime nowadays from left to
right.
De Sousa (2012)
Chinese people had to arrange events (top-bottom, bottom-top, clockwise, left-right,
right-left). There is a correlation between age and arrangement of cards, consistent
with change in writing conventions. Older people: right to left, younger people: left to
right.
Levinson & Majid (2013)
Dutch participants consistently placed things from left-to-right, but only half Yélî Dnye
participants did There is a strong relationship between ordering & literacy.
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