If This Paper Were in Chinese, Would Chinese People Understand the Title? An Exploration of Whorfian Claims About the Chinese Language If This Paper Were in Chinese, Would Chinese

8/3/2019 If This Paper Were in Chinese, Would Chinese People Understand the Title? An Exploration of Whorfian Claims Abo

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CRCC Tech Report no. 21, Cognitive Science Dept., Indiana University

510 N. Fess, Bloomington IN 47408

If This Paper Were in Chinese,

Would Chinese People Understand the Title?

An Exploration of Whorfian Claims About the Chinese Language

David MoserCenter for Chinese Studies

Fluid Analogies Research Group (Psychology Dept.)

University of Michigan

Introduction

This paper is primarily intended as an introduction to the work of the

linguist Alfred Bloom and to the subsequent studies of psychologist Terry Kit-fongAu which challenged Bloom's results. Also included in this paper are my own

thoughts and analyses of the ongoing debate, as well as some reflections on

language and issues related to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in its weak form. Mybackground includes neither psychology nor linguistics, but my hope is that this

paper might be of interest to collegues and friends with expertise in those areas,

and that they might be thus motivated to contribute to any research I mightundertake in the future. I have assumed no knowledge of Chinese on the part of

the reader, nor any familiarity with the issues of the Bloom-Au controversy. My

apologies to those readers who have to wade through material already familiar to

them.

Bloom's work

Earlier in this century, the American linguist Edward Sapir and his studentBenjamin Lee Whorf undertook to study the languages of the American Indians in

an attempt to record and analyze them before their various speech communities

became scattered or perchance died out. They encountered in these languageswhat seemed to them at the time to be enormous differences from Indo-European

languages, and this led them to speculate that these linguistic differences might

cause the speakers of these languages to conceptualize the world in fundamentally

different ways. This general idea that language influences thought is known as theSapir-Whorf hypothesis, or simply the Whorf hypothesis, and it has fallen out of

favor in recent decades partly because it has been at odds with the fundamental

assumptions of several prevalent schools of psychology (such as behaviorism), and

partly because evidence in favor of it has proved so elusive.Alfred Bloom, a linguist at Swarthmore College, has done some work that

provides an interesting new research direction for the Whorf hypothesis. Hebegins his book, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought with the following anecdote:

In 1972-1973, while I was in Hong Kong working on the development of aquestionnaire designed to measure levels of abstraction in political thinking, I

happened to ask Chinese-speaking subjects questions of the form, If the Hong


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Kong government were to pass a law requiring that all citizens born outside of

Hong Kong make weekly reports of their activities to the police, how would you

react?; or If the Hong Kong government had passed such a law, how would youhave reacted? Rather unexpectedly and consistently, subjects responded But the

government hasn't, It can't, or It won't. I attempted to press them a little by

explaining, for instance, that I know the government hasn't and won't, but let usimagine that it does or did... Yet such attempts to lead the subjects to reason about

things that they knew could not be the case only served to frustrate them and

tended to give rise to such exclamations as We don't speak/think that way; It'sunnatural; It's unChinese. Some subjects with substantial exposure to Western

languages and culture even branded these questions and the logic they imply as

prime examples of Western thinking. By contrast, American and French

subjects, responding to similar questions in their native languages, never seemed tofind anything unnatural about them and in fact readily indulged in the

counterfactual hypothesizing they were designed to elicit.1

This striking and seemingly deep-seated cultural difference led Bloom toinvestigate the possible link between the treatment of counterfactual utterances in

the Chinese language and what he perceived to be a relative disinclination on thepart of Chinese speakers to enter into this mode of discourse. (A counterfactual

statement is any sentence such as the kind often marked in English by the use of

would have or might have. The sentence Marsha went to the movies and saw

Bill there is a simple declarative statement of fact, whereas If Marsha had goneto the movies, she would have seen Bill there, is a statement based on an

assumption counter to the known facts a counterfactual statement.)

Bloom noted that, whereas English, like most Western languages, hasrelatively unambiguous grammatical forms that mark the counterfactual, Chinese

has no distinct lexical or grammatical device that explicitly signals that the events

being talked about did not occur, and are being described only for the purpose ofexploring what might have been or might be.2 In order to make this point clear, I

will very briefly examine the way the Chinese language handles tense in general.

Chinese does not have precise grammatical markings for the wide range oftenses found in most Western languages. It is not the case, as some naive accounts

have had it, that Chinese has no tense at all, though it is true that the verb itself in a

Chinese sentence never changes to reflect tense in the way that, for example, go

in English changes to went or gone. Tense in Chinese is usually marked bythe use of certain particles or auxiliary words that come before or after the verb.

For example, the sentence I went in Chinese comes out something like I go +

particle indicating past tense. Often a time word precedes the action of thesentence: Yesterday I go + particle indicating past tense. Actually, the Chinese

marking of tense is a somewhat complex issue, well beyond the scope of this

paper. The important things to keep in mind for the purposes of this discussionare: (1) Chinese simply has fewer and less specific grammatical markings for

tenses than English has. (2) Even those markings are not employed as

mechanically as the various tenses are in English. If the time of the event in

question is already clear either from context or from some previous time-word or


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tense marker, the particles indicating tense are often left out. In the English

sentence He told me he liked her, the use of the past tense is not optional; it is

dictated by grammar. By contrast, in Chinese, if the past-tense context is alreadyclear, the same meaning would most likely be expressed as He tell me he like

her, (where tell and like are not really the equivalent of our present-tense

verbs, but rather neutral, tenseless verbs). (3) Chinese definitely does not havean unambiguous marker for the counterfactual corresponding to the English If X

were/had been the case.....

In Chinese, the sentence If Marsha had gone to the library, she wouldhave seen Bill, is expressed as If Marsha goes to the library she (then) sees Bill.

(Jiaru Marsha qu tushuguan de hua, ta jiu hui kan dao Bill.) As long as the context

is clear (i.e., the listener knows that Marsha didn't, in fact, go to the library), there

is no problem in understanding that the phrase If Marsha goes means If Marshahad gone, and therefore the phrase she sees Bill is to be interpreted as she

would have seen Bill there. And indeed, since most such speech acts are highly

contexted, Chinese people easily and routinely use such counterfactual utterances

in everyday life with no more problem, as far as I know, than English speakers,who do have an explicit marker for them. But note that in another context, or in a

situation where the context is less clear (i.e., the listener doesn't know whether ornot Marsha went to the library), the sentence in Chinese If Marsha goes to the

library, she (then) sees Bill is ambiguous. In addition to the counterfactual

interpretation just mentioned, it could also mean If Marsha goes (right now) to the

library, she then will see Bill, or If Marsha went to the library (yesterday), shemay have seen Bill. The sentence could have any of these meanings, and the

hearer must integrate available knowledge of the facts in order to arrive at the

correct interpretation --- a cognitive task that, given a context, is usuallyaccomplished with no difficulty.

To Bloom, this lack of explicit markers for counterfactuals in Chinese

implied that, although Chinese speakers obviously do produce and understandcounterfactual utterances,

...they would typically do so less directly, with a greater investment of cognitiveeffort and hence less naturally than their English-speaking counterparts. It would

imply as well that they would not typically perceive the distinction between

counterfactual and implicational (i.e., e.g., the distinction between if he had

gone...he would have seen and if he went...he saw) as one of the divisions intowhich their cognitive world is divided....And finally, the suggestion that Chinese

speakers do not typically make use of cognitive schemas specific to counterfactual

thought would imply that Chinese speakers might be expected typically toencounter difficulty in maintaining a counterfactual perspective as an active point

of orientation for guiding their cognitive activities. Chinese speakers might be

expected, for example, if presented with an extended string of complexcounterfactual arguments, to find it difficult to keep in mind, as they process the

complex entailment relationships which hold between the arguments presented, the

fact that all the arguments concern the would have been or the might have

been rather than the world of actual fact.3


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Bloom devised a group of psychological tests designed to yield evidence

for his intuitions, and all of those experiments are dealt with in his book. I willdiscuss in detail only two of those tests -- the ones for which the psychologist

Terry Au did her own counter-studies.

In order to test his intuition that Chinese might have trouble processing astring of counterfactual arguments, Bloom devised three different versions of a

paragraph in the form X was not the case, but if X had been the case, Y would

have been the case, Z would have been the case... and so on, varying the numberof counterfactual cues. Here is version 3 of the paragraph, which was given to

both Chinese-speaking subjects in Hong Kong and Taiwan and English-speaking

subjects in the U.S.A.:

Bier was an 18th century European philosopher who wanted very much to

investigate the principles of the universe and the laws of nature. Because there

was some contact between China and Europe at that time, Chinese philosophical

works could be found in Europe; but none had been translated. Bier could not readChinese, but if he had been able to read Chinese he would have found that while

Western philosophers generally investigated natural phenomena as individualentities, Chinese philosophers generally investigated natural phenomena in terms

of their mutual interrelationships. If Bier had read Chinese philosophy he would

certainly have been influenced by it, have synthesized it with Western philosophy,

and have created a theory which not only explained natural phenomena asindividual entities, but which also made clear their interrelationships. This theory

would not only have overcome a weakness in the Western philosophy of that time,

but also would have had a deep influence on German, French, and Dutchphilosophy, leading them closer to science.

Please indicate, by choosing one or more of the following answers, whatcontribution or contributions Bier made to the West according to the paragraph

above:

1. Bier led Western philosophy to pay attention to natural phenomena as individual

entities.

2. He led Western philosophy to pay attention to the mutual interrelationships

among natural phenomena.3. He led European philosophy closer to science.

4. He led Western philosophy one step closer to Chinese philosophy.

5. None of these answers are appropriate. (Please explain your own opinionbriefly.)4

Presumably, readers who caught on to the fact that the paragraph saysnothing about what Bier did, but only what he would have done, would opt for

answer number 5.

The results were rather dramatic. Of the three Chinese-speaking groups

tested Taiwanese hotel workers, Taiwanese students, and Hong Kong students


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only 46%, 63%, and 50%, respectively, arrived at the correct counterfactual

answer for the paragraph, while the Americans (students and non-students

combined) almost invariably (96%) chose the right answer. Interviews withChinese subjects after the test revealed that those who had failed to respond

correctly had either (1) forgotten the philosopher could not speak Chinese by the

time they got to the last few implications in the series, or (2) ---and this was thecase for the large majority of subjects---had remembered that Bier could not speak

Chinese, but had found that fact incongruent with the subsequent statements in the

paragraph, and so, in order to salvage something from the account, decided that theintent of the paragraph must have been that Bier had achieved some of the

accomplishments listed. Otherwise, why write the paragraph at all? In other

words, says Bloom, for the majority of Chinese-speaking subjects tested,

although recognition of the juxtaposition of a negative premise and implicationalstatements based upon it did lead to the realization that something was askew, it

did not trigger, as it did in the West, a counterfactual interpretation.5 Bloom has

also said that he believes that because of the lack of explicit grammatical markers

for the counterfactual in Chinese, the structuring of a counterfactual interpretationis more subject to derailment by distractions.6 I will deal more with this point

later.Bloom also attributed the higher scores of the university students to their

more extensive knowledge of English, hypothesizing that their exposure to the

conditional (words like would and would have) in English would have

allowed them to extend their use of the counterfactual into their Chinese linguisticworld, meaning that the students would now explicitly invoke counterfactual as

a possible interpretation for their if-then labels.7 Bloom deliberately chose

abstract and somewhat intellectually demanding material for his test. Hisprediction was that English speakers, given the clear grammatical counterfactual

marking would have, would naturally and easily interpret all the implications of

the paragraph as hypothetical, whereas the Chinese subjects, faced with the task ofinferring the counterfactual nature of the implications by integrating the

information given, would encounter greater difficulty. Put another way, the

Chinese would have to deduce the hypothetical nature of the paragraph byunderstanding implicational statements at least well enough to notice that they

were inconsistent with Bier's not being able to speak Chinese, whereas the

Americans would not need to perform this cognitive integration of the materials,

since the counterfactual nature of the paragraph is obvious enough from thegrammar itself.

Bloom, in order to test this explanation, devised a different kind of test

designed to be free of any confounding of language and culture. In this test,Taiwanese subjects who knew English were given version 2 of the Bier paragraph

in Chinese, and then three months later the same paragraph in English, having had

no feedback on the first test. Despite the fact that Chinese was their nativelanguage, these subjects did very poorly on the Chinese version, but much higher

on the English version. Since the comparison was within-subject, the effects of

culture could be safely ruled out: the difference seemed to be due to language

alone.


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Another shorter test also produced very surprising results. Bloom asked

American and Chinese subjects the following question:

If all circles were large, and this small triangle were a circle, would it be

large? (Chinese translation in footnote)

Only 25% of the Taiwanese subjects answered yes, whereas 83% of the

Americans gave the counterfactual response.8 Furthermore, Bloom reported that

when the question was asked orally, the results were even more striking:

It has been my experience in fact that when subjects are presented with the

question orally and informally --- in other words, without given time to hesitate, to

reconsider or to examine the question from different perspectives --- just aboutevery native Chinese speaker who has not been exposed to strong Western

influences, and even very many who have, will spontaneously respond no,

while, by contrast, just about every native English speaker will spontaneously

respond yes. During a talk I gave at Hong Kong University to a group of abouttwenty interested faculty members, I presented the question orally and, to a person,

the audience divided along native speaker lines. Most Chinese respond No! Howcan a circle be a triangle? How can this small circle be large? What do you

mean?9

This result, if it is true, is very intriguing. One simply does not expect tofind cross-cultural differences of this magnitude in what seems to be a rather

straightforward (if somewhat strange) reasoning task. Even more intriguing is

Bloom's contention that this difference is the result of a Whorfian language effect.Together Bloom's results constitute evidence for what is known as the

weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, formulated by Hockett as Languages

differ not so much as to what can be said in them, but rather as to what is relativelyeasy to say.10 (Where say can be replaced by say or understand.) In other

words, language can in some cases predispose people to think or act in certain

ways. Bloom also contends that effects such as Sapir and Whorf hypothesizedwould be most dramatic at more abstract levels of language use, which is one of

the reasons he chose to study counterfactual thinking and the linguistic structures

associated with it rather than differences in lexical items.

Au's refutation of Bloom's results

In 1983 Terry Kit-Fong Au, then at Harvard University, devised a series of

experiments to refute Bloom's interpretation of his results. The ongoing debatebetween Bloom and Au involves a number of complex issues of methodology and

translation that are too numerous and complex to be dealt with in detail here. I

will try to distill what I consider the salient issues in the discussion that follows.Because Au felt that Bloom's Chinese paragraph was not very idiomatic,

she wrote several different versions of a new counterfactual story to give to her

subjects, experimentally manipulating the number of counterfactual cues and the

number of implications in order to test the possible effects of memory


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overloading as an explanation for the comprehension problems evidently

experienced by Bloom's Chinese subjects. Here is the paragraph given in study 1:

Once a Dutch explorer ventured into Central Africa and saw a tribe of natives

gathered around a fire. Hoping to make some interesting discoveries, this Dutch

explorer held his breath and observed the natives attentively from behind thebushes. He heard one of the natives shout in a language which he unfortunately

did not know. He then saw the natives throw a dead human body into a big pot of

boiling water. And when the human broth was done, the natives all hurried todrink some of it. Upon seeing this event, the explorer was absolutely astonished,

and fled as soon as he could. If this explorer had been able to understand the

language spoken by the natives and had not fled so quickly, he would have learnt

that the dead native was actually a hero of the tribe, and was killed in an accident.The explorer would also have learnt that the natives drank the broth of their hero

because they believed that only by doing so could they acquire the virtues of their

hero. If this explorer had been able to understand the language spoken by the

naives and had not fled so quickly, he would have learnt that the natives were veryfriendly, and were not cruel and savage as he had thought.

Please indicate, by choosing one or more of the following answers, which thing or

things about the natives the Dutch explorer knew, according to the above

paragraph:

(1) The dead native was a hero of the tribe.

(2) The dead native was killed in an accident.

(3) The natives believed that they could acquire a dead hero's virtues only byboiling the dead hero's body in water and then drinking the broth.

(4) The natives were friendly and not cruel and savage as the Dutch explorer

thought.(5) None of the above. (Please explain your opinion briefly.)11

Au got very different results with her paragraph than Bloom got with his.96% of the American subjects gave a counterfactual response to the story, and

fully 100% of the Chinese subjects also came up with the correct answer. None of

the variables she tested for memory loading, number of counterfactual cues,

etc. yielded any significant differences in the outcome. Indeed, her Chinesesubjects seem to arrive at the counterfactual answer across the board, even scoring

slightly higher than the American subjects.

Au also attempted to see if Bloom's results were repeatable, giving hersubjects Bloom's Bier paragraph in both the Chinese and English versions. The

English speakers again scored very high, 93%, while 88% of the Chinese speakers

gave counterfactual responses, a rate significantly higher than in Bloom's studyand not significantly different from the Americans in the second study. Au gave

some speculations as to the possible reasons for the discrepancy:


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First, Bloom's task was distributed mostly to college students and graduates by a

Chinese research assistant, whereas the present task was administered either by the

teacher-in-charge or by me in the presence of the teacher, to secondary school and post-secondary vocational school pupils. It is possible that my subjects tried

harder because the experimental situation resembled test situations at secondary

school. In addition, the written Chinese instructions preceding the Bier story inBloom's studies seemed quite unidiomatic. It is possible that the Chinese subjects

in Bloom's studies were annoyed by the unidiomatic Chinese and did not take the

test as seriously. In other words, Bloom's subjects may have been as competent asmine to give counterfactual interpretations to the Bier story, but noise due to the

testing situation and the written instructions may have lowered their

performance.12

In addition, since Au suspected that Bloom's results might have been due to

the translation problems, she wrote the Bier paragraph in ways she considered

more idiomatic, and the test was given to a different group of subjects.13 This

time 97% of the Chinese subjects gave the counterfactual response, so that eventhe intriguing difference between Au's results with the Bloom paragraph (88%)

and her own Human Broth paragraph (100%) seemed to have disappeared.Finally, in order to test her hypothesis that Bloom's results with Chinese

subjects had been the result of unidiomatic translation, she had both the Human

Broth paragraph and the Bier paragraph re-translated into English by four

Chinese students who had been studying English for approximately 12 years. Aureasoned that if Bloom was correct that English speakers automatically reason

counterfactually upon encountering the subjunctive, then a clumsy translation per

se should not have any effect on their counterfactual response rates. Here is one ofthese unidiomatic translations of the Bier paragraph:

Bier was a German philosopher in the 18th century. To study about the theory ofthe Great Harmony and the laws of nature was his greatest interest. In those days,

the communication between China and Europe had already developed to some

extent. Chinese works could be found in Europe but the translations of them werestill not available. If Bier had known about the technique to master the Chinese

language, he would certainly discover the different attitudes between the Chinese

philosophers and the European philosophers when describing the natural

phenomena: the Chinese stressed the interrelationships among these aspects whilethe European ignored them and studied each separately. Suppose Bier had learnt

about the Chinese philosophy, he would certainly develop his own theory, which

included not only a thorough study about the nature of natural phenomena, but alsoa clear explanation of the relations among various natural aspects. Such theory not

only patched up the disadvantages of the Western philosophy, but also influenced

deeply and furthered the development of philosophy in Germany, France, andHolland towards science.14

As might be expected, Au's American subjects performed very poorly on

this particular version of the test: only 52% of those tested gave the correct answer.


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Unidiomatic translation seemed not to have a significant effect on the Human

Broth paragraph, however: American subjects scored 89% and 93% on two

different translations of the text.At this point Au did some of her own counterfactualizing:

Suppose this research story had been initiated by me in Hong Kong with theidiomatic Chinese Bier story and a 97% counterfactual response rate given by my

Chinese-speaking subjects. Wishing to make a cross-national, cross-linguistic

comparison, I had the idiomatic Chinese version translated by a bilingual whohappened to provide me with the unidiomatic Translation-D [the above

translation of the Bier paragraph]. Seeking a group in the U.S. comparable to my

Hong Kong secondary school sample, I found a group of American high school

pupils who gave only 52% counterfactual responses to the Translation-D of theBier story. If these results had been my only research findings, I might have

concluded that there was a national-linguistic difference in counterfactual logic

competence favoring Hong Kong Chinese over Americans. In short, it would be

the reverse of Bloom's conclusion.15

In a later (1984) paper Au also attempted to refute the results of Bloom'striangle-to-circle question. She gave one group of Chinese subjects Bloom's

original question, and to another group she gave a revised version incorporating

some changes she considered more idiomatic.16 There was little difference in the

counterfactual response rates of the two groups (72% for Bloom's version, 73% forAu's) but, interestingly, both were significantly higher than the Chinese speakers'

scores in Bloom's original study. Anticipating Bloom's possible objection that the

discrepancy in the two studies might be due to the fact that Au's subjects hadstudied English, she asked the same subjects to translate a simple counterfactual

Chinese sentence into English, in order to test their mastery of the English

subjunctive. She found that those who could correctly translate the sentence usingthe subjunctive had scored no better on the triangle-to-circle question than those

who could not use the subjunctive, and she therefore concluded that mastery of the

English subjunctive had no effect on the counterfactual performance of thesubjects when using Chinese.

From all these studies, Au concluded that Bloom's results had been due

merely to faulty translations or aspects of the test conditions, and thus did not

constitute proof that Chinese subjects perform any differently from Englishspeakers in tasks requiring counterfactual reasoning.

Discussion of Au's results

Au brings up several objections to Bloom's results, many of which are

subtle and difficult to explain without minute examination of the Chinese texts. I

will limit the discussion below to what I consider the most important issues in thisdebate.

1. Testing problems


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clearly counterfactual in nature, Au's are not. Bloom's implications -- ...would

have discovered Chinese philosophical works...would have been particularly

influenced by...would have synthesized Chinese and Western views... etc. -- alldescribe things which were not, in fact, true, given the original premise. Au's

implications, on the other hand -- ...would have learnt that the dead native was

actually a hero...would have learnt that the natives were very friendly...etc. --merely, in effect, enumerate a list of true facts which the explorer would have

known had he been able to speak the natives' language. That the explorer would

have known these things if only he had been able to speak their language is, infact, the only counterfactual proposition the reader of the paragraph must keep in

mind. In Bloom's paragraph, the implications given do not merely constitute a list

of facts, but are really full-blown hypothetical propositions. Thus in Au's

paragraph, the focus of the counterfactual reasoning process is somewhat clearerand more straightforward than in Bloom's; the paragraph is simply too

conceptually simple to be of any interest (viz., the somewhat suspicious 100%

counterfactual response rate), and again, is irrelevant to Bloom's particular agenda.

The point may seem subtle, but it is worth considering.

3. The Bier paragraphThe criticism that Bloom's translations are flawed or unidiomatic is

certainly one of the most crucial questions here, and at least one other researcher

has also taken issue with his results on these grounds.18 Au found fault with all

three versions of Bloom's paragraph, but since both Au and Bloom have used hisversion 3 as a focal point in the discussion, I have done likewise in this paper.

In psycholinguistic tests such as these, which utilize translated material, the

issue of what can be considered idiomatic or even correct is difficult and subtle,and here is compounded by the fact that prose style was precisely one of the

variables Bloom concerned himself with. The aim in constructing the stories, he

says, was, of course, not that of typifying the most colloquial of styles, for thatwas not the issue, but rather that of varying the difficulty of style and content,

within the range of grammatical, acceptable and comprehensible Chinese, so as to

be able to test the impact of that variation on level of counterfactual response.19Ironically, there is evidence from Au herself that Bloom's paragraph falls at least

within this range of acceptable Chinese. For if the story's unidiomatic quality is

responsible for the lower counterfactual response rates of Bloom's subjects, then

how can Au explain the fact that 88% of her own subjects respondedcounterfactually to the identical paragraph?

But the question of whether Bloom's paragraph is written in grammatical,

acceptable and comprehensible Chinese is different from the question of whetherBloom's paragraph makes the same thing happen in the head of a native Chinese

speaker as in the head of an English speaker. In evaluating the success of a

particular translation, we can ask the question, Is this the way a native speakerwould have written the paragraph? This seemingly simple question actually

raises a number of complicated issues -- for example, What if the very style of the

original were one that would normally not be employed or one that feels unnatural

in the target language (e.g., one that employs the counterfactual mode)?


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I, a lowly non-native and not even fluent speaker of Chinese, cannot

authoritatively evaluate the quality and flavor of Bloom's translations, but my

feeling is that the paragraph in question (Bier version 3) certainly contains nooutright errors, and may not even be unidiomatic per se, keeping in mind the

questions I raised above. (Not so with versions 1 and 2, which are more

problematic. I deal with this later.) I have informally given the Bier paragraphand set of questions to many Chinese friends, and on numerous occasions have

discussed with them the paragraph's language and style (giving them the English

original for comparison, of course). At least one person reported that it had thefeel of a translated text, and several people have characterized the style as stilted or

antiquated. (I should note that the English original does not seem to me a model of

good writing, either.) Everyone has found it dry and plodding. Certainly no one

has objected that the language is incomprehensible or grossly misleading in someway. Issues of style are, of course, very subjective, but the effects can be no less

real for that, and Au's concerns about the quality of translation are legitimate.

4. Au's intentionally unidiomatic translationsAu's intentionally unidiomatic translations of the Bier paragraph seem to

me methodologically suspect, and I think any comparison of them with Bloom'soriginal is somewhat inappropriate and unfair. For one thing, even a casual

reading of the translation I gave earlier reveals out-and-out grammatical blunders,

such as using would instead of would have to mark the past-tense conditional.

Whatever the translation problems with the Bier paragraph are, it was, according toBloom, written by native speakers of Chinese, and judged to be at least

grammatically acceptable by other Chinese speakers. To compare this text with an

English translation written by non-native speakers is simply ridiculous.Furthermore, even if it turns out that the Bloom paragraph is unidiomatic to the

point of being grammatically unacceptable, how can Au be sure that the awkward

English translations she used are unidiomatic in exactly the same way? She is atthat point confronted with the same translational hazards that Bloom faced, with

perhaps even murkier criteria of success to boot, since the goal of her translation is

to test the effects of obfuscation rather than the limits of clear communication.Another complicating factor in the experiment is that the American

subjects all knew they were reading translations written by non-native speakers20

It is unclear what effect this might have had on the subjects' responses.

Despite the objections to her translation on strict methodological grounds,Au's overall point is well-taken: It does seem likely that the level of the

paragraph's idiomatic quality might have some effect on comprehension. More

preferable would have been a series of paragraphs that were consistentlygrammatically sound but varying in degrees of idiomatic quality. As the matter

stands, Au's tests do provide some slight (albeit flawed) evidence that the

counterfactual reasoning process in English speakers is also subject to the kind ofderailment that Bloom hypothesizes, despite the presence in English of explicit

grammatical counterfactual markings.

5. The triangle-to-circle question


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There may be many complex reasons for the difference (if any) between

Chinese and English speakers on this question, and my intuition is that the

question of translation per se is not the most important one. Note, for example,that Au's subjects performed almost exactly as well on her improved version of the

triangle-to-circle question as they did on Bloom's original. I have many other

thoughts on this that I will spell out below, but the biggest question to answer hereis why Au's subjects did so much better than Bloom's on the same test materials.

Bloom would most likely contend, as Au realized, that her subjects' extensive

exposure to English made them more likely to interpret the sentence correctly. Au,anticipating this objection, gave her subjects an additional test to determine which

of them could correctly use the conditional in English. She then noted that the

subjects who seemingly could use the subjunctive scored no better on the test than

those who seemingly couldn't, and thus concluded that her subjects' knowledge ofEnglish had had no effect on their performance. But, leaving aside for the moment

Bloom's point about the possible influences of English on Chinese counterfactual

reasoning, is Au justified in so confidently equating the lack of ability to construct

English sentences using the conditional with ignorance of it? The word knowhere has a slippery quality. The process of learning a language is slow and

cumulative, and we passively absorb and come to know many words andstructures long before we are able to actively and correctly use them.

It is unclear to me from reading the rest of Au's paper what her final stance

is on the discrepancy between her results and Bloom's results on the triangle-to-

circle question. She first contends that, as with the Bier paragraph, the problem isone of translation, and that with a few idiomatic improvements, Chinese

performance on the test would match that of the English speakers. But her results

using the original wording of the question do not exactly replicate Bloom's; hersubjects did much better ---almost exactly as well as those who responded to her

improved translation. It would seem that from Au's standpoint, either Bloom's

results were simply wrong, or the translation issue is not a crucial one. Bloom canstill claim, of course, that Au's subjects' knowledge of English biased the results.

Problems with Bloom's interpretation1. Analysis of his contention that the Chinese lack a cognitive schema for the

counterfactual

Bloom has, of course, never said that Chinese people are somehow

incapable of dealing with counterfactual sentences --- a belief that a few criticswith only a passing acquaintance with Bloom's work and complete ignorance of

the Chinese language have been quick to attribute to him. What he does claim,

however, is that Chinese speakers lack a cognitive schema for dealing withthem:

...[T]he fact that the English speaker has a distinct label for the counterfactual (i.e.had...would have), which the Chinese speaker does not share, cannot by any

means be expected to bestow upon the English speaker an exclusive facility for

that mode of thought, but it might be expected to encourage him or her, by contrast

to his or her Chinese counterpart, to develop a cognitive schema specific to that


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way of thinking --- a schema that represents an achieved integration of the idea of

an implication linking two events with the idea that neither of these events

constitutes a factual occurence.21

What, exactly, does Bloom mean by cognitive schema? He borrows the

term from the so-called cognitive structuralists, a rather loosely defined schoolthat includes Piaget and Fodor, among others. Bloom defines the term thus:

...[W]e impose meaningful organization on the infinitely varying world of senseexperience, by means of a highly complex and extensive repertory of discrete

cognitive schemas. According to this view, our schemas permit us to divide up

and conquer the world, cognitively-speaking, to segment it cognitively into the

types of objects, actions, relations, and properties we perceive to exist in it...They[cognitive schemas] constitute the component elements of the thoughts we think

and the nodes around which we construct our more permanent, long-term models

of the world.22

(It will not be my purpose here to critique the notion of cognitive schemas as a

whole, but only to examine what Bloom has to say about them in the context of hisbook and in relation to Chinese.)

According to Bloom (who is borrowing from Piaget and Vygotsky),

children rapidly develop a repertoire of cognitive schemas such as mommy,

red, and crawl, which they soon begin to use in constructing more abstractmental nodes such as mothers, red things, and acts of crawling. Language

acquisition is parallel to and concomitant with this process, and children soon

master an imposing set of linguistic structures -- grammatical schemas such asdependent clauses, passive constructions, the negative question, the tag question,

etc. -- that they utilize in order to retrieve, refer to, and link the various cognitive

schemas at their disposal. What kinds of things have cognitive schemas associatedwith them? There are cognitive schemas for fathers, games, animals,

clothing, and faces. There are cognitive schemas for color, shape,

hungry, thirsty, magazine, birthday, diplomatic immunity, military-industrial complex -- in short, there are cognitive schemas for just about any thing

or concept that can be named, talked about, or considered with any degree of

autonomy or boundedness. Some cognitive schemas are strongly associated

with certain linguistic schemas, such as the relatively abstract cognitive schemaevoked by If X had been the case...then Y would have been the case.

To use one of Bloom's examples, constructing a cognitive schema for

bachelor would involve an integration of several existing cognitive schemas,those for male, unmarried, adult, etc. Speakers of a language that lacked a

word for bachelor could still refer to the concept by invoking unmarried adult

male, or other appropriate cognitive schemas available to them in their language.Of course, given the enormous number of these schemas, it is

inconceivable that each one would have a linguistic label associated with it.

Bloom is very aware of this point and makes it clear that a very large number,


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perhaps most, of the cognitive schemas one constructs are free of any influence of

exerted by the language one speaks.

The child will certainly continue, and in fact continue throughout life, to construct

a very large number of cognitive schemas, on his own, free of any influence

exerted by the language/s he learns to speak. He will construct schemas formaking beds, for typing papers, for recognizing that his car is skidding on a patch

of ice, and for storing motor information as to how to deal with it... -- schemas that

will remain, in other words, components of his inordinately complex array of non-labeled thoughts.23

Bloom's cognitive schemas -- that is, those which are associated with

linguistic schemas -- are related in some way to Whorf's notion of cryptotypes. Hecalled them categories of semantic organization, and they correspond to no

specific word, yet are shown by linguistic analysis to be functionally important in

grammar.24 The English-language categories of transitive and intransitive verbs,

for example, would constitute two separate cryptotypes. Cryptotypes differ fromBloom's cognitive schemas in that they float somewhere below the level of

specific words and are not overtly labeled in the language, whence their name.Cognitive schemas bear a much closer resemblance to the ICM's, or

Idealized Cognitive Models, of George Lakoff, a linguist at the University of

California at Berkeley.25 His book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things is a

fascinating overview of just about every important theory of mind to arise in thelast century, and it presents, among other things, some interesting new ideas on the

relation of language to thought and reality. I cannot begin to do justice to his work

here, but I will note just one of the similarities of Lakoff's ICM's to Bloom'scognitive schemas. ICM's are node-like entities linked with and contingent upon

other ICM's in a complex network of concepts. The ICM for bachelor, for

example, is defined with respect to an ICM in which there is a human society withmonogomous marriages, a typical marriagable age, typical marriagable types of

males, etc. In such an ICM, Moslem men who are permitted four wives and only

have three would not be considered bachelors, and neither would the Pope, thoughhe is certainly an unmarried male. Similarly, what Bloom calls cognitive schemas

are just such interlocked, embedded, and mutually dependent cognitive entities.

The cognitive schema for Gross National Product, for example, would be

defined with respect to other cognitive schemas such as country and industry.Given the fact that, as mentioned above, not all cognitive schemas have

linguistic labels, what exactly is the relationship of language to cognitive schemas?

In other words, how does Bloom make his case for a Whorfian effect of theChinese language on its speakers?

What the Chinese lack, says Bloom, is an achieved integration of the idea

of an implication linking two events with the idea that neither of these eventsconstitutes a factual occurrence. What he means by this is not that Chinese

speakers in the Chinese psycholinguistic world are unable to use or understand

counterfactuals, but rather that the process involved is somewhat more indirect

than that of their English-speaking counterparts. That is, Chinese speakers


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understand counterfactual statements by inferring from the informational context

that the proposition is contrary to known facts and therefore must be a statement

about what might have been but wasn't. English speakers have no need for such anindirect process, since the counterfactuality of the sentence is handed to them on a

silver platter by virtue of their grammar:

When the English speaker hears the sentence If you had warned them earlier,

perhaps the accident would have been avoided, he is left with the cognitive

burden of having to resolve what kind of warning might have been effective, howeffective it is likely to have been, how responsible he personally should feel for the

fact that the warning was not given, etc.; but he is not left with the burden of

having to resolve that the sentence is counterfactual. The labels had...would

have signal to him directly and unambiguously that a counterfactual interpretationis intended. And his language has already prepared him, through its use of those

labels, to interpret directly, as a single unit, without requiring any further cognitive

act, the integration of negated premise and implication based upon it. For the

English speaker, the counterfactuality of a sentence constitutes, as it were, one ofthe elementary components on the basis of which he constructs his interpretation

of the sentence heard, while for the Chinese speaker, it consititutes one of theresults of his interpretive act.26

What Bloom is contending is that this difference in the way Chinese

speakers interpret counterfactual sentences implies that they might experiencedifficulties with texts involving a string of complex counterfactual arguments, in

which the counterfactuality of the arguments is not a priori clear. English provides

explicit counterfactual markers that can be used as a stable point of orientation ininterpreting such texts; Chinese does not. Hence Bloom's Whorfian claim, and

hence the nature of his experiments.

An analogous example in English might make this clearer. There areseveral cognitive schemas associated with the word if, as evidenced by the

following examples:

If a mouse is deprived of food for one week, then it will die.

(If-then, consequential. What follows the if clause is a necessary consequence

of it.)

If a mouse is deprived of food for one week, then it has been without

sustenance for seven days.

(If-then, definitional. What follows the if clause is true by definition.)

There is nothing grammatically to distinguish these two different types of

if for us; we must deduce the meaning of these sentences from what we know

about the situation, the world, the intentions of the speaker, etc. We are not

explicitly directed to one or the other cognitive schema (to use Bloom's term)


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merely by the presence of the word if; therefore we must wait until the entire

sentence has been said before we can disambiguate it. Or, to use one of Bloom's

examples, a child knows that the sentence

If you hold this glass with only one hand you will break it,

does not imply that there are no other ways of breaking it, but a child who hears

the sentence

If you eat your dinner you can go to the movies,

in context will infer that eating dinner is the only way to be permitted to go to the

movies. Later on, if the child goes on to study logic in college, he or she will haveto assimilate a few more possible meanings of if, such as if-and-only-if,

(commonly written iff). Other hard-to-categorize usages are found in such

sentences as:

If you like that cake, there's some more in the fridge.

Most native speakers have probably never consciously noticed these

different meanings of the word if, yet they are able to use and understand such

sentences with little difficulty.27

Does this mean that English speakers have no separate cognitive schemasfor the two different meanings of if? This surely cannot be what Bloom means

to say. For one thing, he makes it very clear that not all cognitive schemas are

represented linguistically. Secondly, we must surely have something likecognitive schemas in our heads for the two different meanings of if, even though

they are undifferentiated in the language, since native speakers routinely use and

understand such sentences. Similarly, Chinese speakers must have a schema forcounterfactual, even though it is unmarked in their language, since they use

counterfactuals all the time. Perhaps Bloom means to argue that because Chinese

lacks an explicit counterfactual marker, Chinese speakers are thus not consciouslyaware of the distinction when they make it (similar to the way an English speaker

unconsciously disambiguates the word if). But even if this is true, does it

necessarily imply a difference in the performance of counterfactual reasoning

tasks? Most of our use of language is rapid and unconscious, and none the worsefor it. Is it Bloom's contention that we might experience greater difficulty in

bringing to bear any unlabeled schema than any labeled schema? It may be true

that, as he says, ...they [Chinese speakers] would not typically perceive thedistinction between counterfactual and implicational as one of the divisions into

which their cognitive world is divided, but that is quite different from saying that

they don't possess an implicit, functional command of something like acounterfactual schema.

Put another way, the question for Bloom is this: Is it the case that Chinese

speakers have no cognitive schema for the counterfactual, or is it merely that, for


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them, the counterfactual is one of many unlabeled cognitive schemas? Bloom

makes a case that labeled schemas have a special status in language:

Although...linguistic labels certainly do not act as the medium in which we think,

or act to exclusively determine the way in which we think, they do lead us to

extend our cognitive repertories in language-specific ways, to develop manyschemas through which we come to cognize the world, store information about it

and plan our reactions to it that we would be unlikely to develop without their aid.

But the influence of linguistic labels on our cognitive lives appears toextend even beyond the role they play in shaping the schematic foundations of

those lives, for linguistic labels not only guide the development of many of our

schemas, but they provide those schemas whose development they direct, and

specific others besides, with names. And the very fact that a schema is namedseems to imply that it can perform some very special cognitive functions that

unnamed schemas cannot perform.28

Presumably, for Chinese speakers the counterfactual schema is included in thisgroup of unnamed schemas. So what happened to the claim that Chinese speakers

have no cognitive schema for the counterfactual? There may be just a problem ofinconsistent use of terminology here, but I find Bloom's account of cognitive

schemas hard to follow with regard to this point. Leaving this aside for the

moment, what exactly are these special cognitive functions that named schemas

can perform and unnamed schemas cannot? When a schema has a name, saysBloom, the other cognitive schemas that constitute it are conveniently chunked

together as a unit, and can be used in thought and reasoning more directly and

easily:

[O]nce a language has led us to the creation of specific cognitive integrations, no

matter how complex they are, or how long it has taken us to build them, we seemto be able to make use of those integrations as tools of our thoughts without any

greater investment of cognitive energy than we expend in making use of their

simpler components. Once the word bachelor has led us to integrate the notionsman, unmarried, never married, and adult, we are spared the cognitive effort, while

thinking about bachelors, of having to keep those four component dimensions, at

least consciously-speaking, simultaneously in mind -- we are able to think about

bachelors, draw up theories about bachelors, and remember things about bachelorsas easily as we can think about, draw up theories about or remember things about

men or adults, or unmarried people taken separately.29

The account sounds intuitively plausible as long as Bloom is using lexical items

like bachelor as examples. But remember that he is using this example to

illustrate how grammatical structures like If such-and-such had been the case...could also serve as stable points of cognitive orientation in thought. Is there some

fundamental difference between lexical items and grammatical structures that

would make it inappropriate to equate the two in this way? Is it possible that

grammatical structures are used in thought in a way that individual words are not?


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There are still many problems and uncertainties that revolve around

Bloom's use of the term cognitive schema, but he does seem to be saying that the

presence of a grammatical schema for the counterfactual is somehow causallylinked to the existence of a cognitive schema for it (at least in this case). And here,

for me is where some of the confusion arises. Which is it that bestows a

psycholinguistic advantage on English speakers, the presence of a cognitiveschema for the counterfactual, or the explicit marker for it? These two are not the

same, after all. Recall that Bloom contends that his Chinese subjects who spoke

English extended their cognitive schemas for the counterfactual to their Chinesepsycholinguistic world. Yet how would this provide any advantage in interpreting

complex counterfactual arguments such as those presented in the Bier paragraph,

since the explicit linguistic markers Bloom says serve as stable points of

orientation are still absent from Chinese? Bloom has an answer to this:

Chinese bilingual speakers, who use the counterfactual in English and who find

themselves in situations which call upon them to translate abstract English

arguments into Chinese, might be expected over time to begin to extend their useof the counterfactual into their Chinese linguistic world by, for example , attaching

the counterfactual as a second meaning to their Chinese labels for if-then. Atthat point, their Chinese label if-then would become, for them, an explicitly

ambiguous signal of both the implicational and the counterfactual...30

I contend that what Bloom is describing is really not an unusual state of affairs. Infact, all Chinese people, whether they know English or not, sometimes perceive

the if-then construction as counterfactual and sometimes as implicational. This

is manifestly true, since, as I have said repeatedly, use of the counterfactual isquite common in Chinese and the if-then construction is often used to express it.

It's simply that the Chinese don't consciously make the distinction, just as English

speakers are not always aware of the different uses of if. Since it is ludicrous tocontend that Chinese speakers do not have a integrated notion of the concept x

was not the case, but might have been, it seems Bloom is left with only the

argument that this explicit bringing-to-bear of the counterfactual might result insome advantage for English speakers.

The whole issue of how a language might influence the construction of

cognitive schemas is a very important one, of course, and it is by no means

restricted to a few esoteric cases in Chinese and English. Just to pick a couple ofexamples at random, English speakers, when first studying French, invariably

experience some difficulty in mastering the use of the verbs savoir and connatre.

Does the fact that the meanings of both these words are usually subsumed underthe one word know imply that English speakers do not have cognitive schemas

for the two meanings? Are there any situations in which the cognitive

performance of French people would differ from that of English speakers due tothis difference? Another example involves the third-person singular -- in English,

he, she or it. Oral Chinese does not make this distinction; all three

meanings are carried by one word, ta. It is well-known that Chinese people, when

speaking English, have a strong tendency to confuse he and she, whereas


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speakers of other Western languages have virtually no difficulty in this regard

when speaking English. Even Chinese with a good command of English will still

occasionally make this slip, whereas, say, a French person speaking English has notrouble remembering to apply he to a male and she to a female -- after all, this

distinction is a feature of their language, as well. Why this difficulty on the part of

Chinese speakers? Is it possible that their cognitive schema for third-personsingular has no slot for male and female? Could it be that speakers of

Western languages have at least two different cognitive schemas in this case -- one

for male and one for female, whereas the Chinese only have one --he/she/it? If so, what possible psycholinguistic consequences might this have?

The Whorfian literature is filled with such examples of linguistic differences, but

so far, evidence for measurable cognitive differences between cultures attributable

to language has been hard to find.Bloom believes that one of the reasons such evidence has been so difficult

to ferret out is that researchers have been looking in the wrong place:

If...we are to uncover the more significant effects of language on the way we think,we have to turn our attention away from the cognitive effects of linguistic labels,

such as color names, that stake out simple categorizations of the perceptual world,and direct our attention instead to the cognitive effects of linguistic labels that lead

us to build those highly complex, abstractly derived perspectives on reality that we

[are] unlikely to construct without their aid....[W]e have to turn our attention as

well, away from tasks such as those of color memory in which perceptualencodings of task-relevant information can compete with, or substitute for,

linguistic encodings, and direct our attention instead to tasks in which successful

performance depends on the use of information that can neither be represented inperceptual terms nor easily disengaged and maintained in mind without the aid of

associated linguistic labels.31

[F]or cognitive activities for which perceptually definable categorizations of

reality suffice (such as those that have served as the focus of previous

experimental investigations into the effects of distinct languages on thinking),there is no particular reason that a speaker should use linguistically shaped

schemas as the bases of his thinking. For cognitive activities which depend on

highly abstracted representations of reality, however, only linguistically shaped

schemas can effectively serve, and so it is in such activities that a speaker'sthinking might be expected to be most reflective of the constraints and

conveniences inherent in his/her language.32

A remark of Charles Hockett's echoes these statements of Bloom's: The impact of

inherited linguistic pattern on activities is, in general, least important in the most

practical contexts, and most important in such goings-on as story-telling, religion,and philosophizing...33

This is, of course, a terribly complex issue, and the best Bloom can hope to

do is to present his experimental results as evidence for his conjecture. Later on,


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however, I will try to show that there are other possible interpretations for his

results.

2. Translation problems

As I mentioned, the Bier paragraph I've dealt with in this paper is not the

only version Bloom used for his testing, though it is the most central to the Bloom-Au debate. He actually wrote three versions, though only the results from versions

2 and 3 were used in his book. (See the appendices for the texts of both

paragraphs). Au raises some valid criticisms of version two which merit somemention here. Those with no knowledge of Chinese may want to skip this short

section.

Au's main criticism of version 2 is that it is not in the counterfactual mode,

that is, it is missing some grammatical clues that would have made it easier forChinese readers to interpret the text counterfactually. What Au says is missing

from the several implications of the paragraph (such as If Bier had been able to

read Chinese, he would have....) is the crucial word hui, which roughly

corresponds to the English will/shall or might, and is commonly used to markan implication as hypothetical. Bloom used instead the word jiu, which can also

be sufficient to mark the implication as hypothetical (as in Ruguo tamen lai,women jiu zou), but here is too easily confused with its other meaning, only,

just, or precisely. So when Bloom writes Youqi zui yingxiang ta de jiu

shi..., it might be interpreted by the Chinese reader not as What would have

influenced him most..., but rather, What most influenced him was precisely....The problem, it seems (at least based on the opinions of my Chinese friends), is

that Bloom's use of jiu can sometimes be sufficient to get the idea across, in rapid,

casual conversation, and when the counterfactuality of the implication is well-known to the speaker. But all my Chinese informants complain that, in the context

of version 2 a paragraph written in a very academic style and presenting totally

unfamiliar material the use of jiu simply isn't strong enough to carry thehypothetical implication, and they become very confused when they encounter it in

this context.

It seems that, in stretching the limits of what could be consideredgrammatical Chinese in order to be as parsimonious as possible with

counterfactual clues, Bloom went a bit too far. It's possible that the Chinese

people who translated it for him were so familiar with the material that they

honestly did not see that the result was unspecific to the point of beingungrammatical, or close to the point of being ungrammatical. It's still my opinion

that there are no outright errors in version 3 of the paragraph, but it does seem that

version 2 is simply an unacceptable translation. Granted, Bloom intentionallytuned these paragraphs by adjusting their levels of comprehensibility and

grammaticality. But the fact that version 2 seems flawed in this way does tend to

cast some doubt on the other translations.This brings up a point I raised earlier, namely, wording a text

grammatically and comprehensibly is not the same task as wording it the way a

native speaker would. Any good translator will testify to the fact that merely

checking to make sure there is a rough isomorphism between the two texts is not a


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good indicator of translational fidelity. There is no reliable metric to measure the

relative effects of two phrases in two different languages. Suppose a superlative

Chinese-English bilingual were to say to Bloom, Your translation, whileseemingly straightforward and correct, is actually inappropriate. Because Chinese

does not have a clear counterfactual marker, you simply cannot say 'Bier couldn't

speak Chinese. If he had been able to, he would have done such-and-such.' Youmust say something more like 'Bier couldn't speak Chinese, but please do a little

counterfactualizing for a moment and imagine that he had been able to...' Only

then will you succeed in getting the 'same' idea across to the Chinese reader. Butwhere do you draw the line? Would it be reasonable to add several sentences to

the Chinese version setting up the reader to adopt a counterfactual interpretation

and still consider it a faithful translation? How about a whole paragraph? And at

what point would one simply concede Bloom's point: that Chinese speakers havetrouble dealing with the counterfactual in some cases where English speakers

don't? Yet suppose we allow Bloom this hypothesis. Does it really suggest that

Chinese, in their natural linguistic environment, somehow deal with

counterfactuals differently than we do? Or does it merely prove a rather obviouspoint, namely that any number of artificial translation situations can be created

such that the speakers of one language will be forced to flail around and producedifficult, unidiomatic prose in order to accomodate a structure that seems perfectly

natural in another language? Pat Cheng also raises these issues in her critique of

Bloom's work. In discussing possible tests for the Whorfian hypothesis, she says:

[N]ot only must materials in both languages be grammatical and idiomatic, they

must also be as clearly written as possible in each language, even if this implies

that the versions are not literal translations of each other. After all, even subjectswho are given two versions of different clarity in the same language may show

better performance on the more clearly written version. Such a difference

obviously does not demonstrate that language shapes thought.34

These are difficult issues, and part of the difficulty is that the domainBloom is interested in seems to be located precisely at one of those places where

questions of grammar and style collide. I will deal more with this point later.

3. Other ways of expressing the counterfactual in ChineseClosely related to these issues is the question of the various ways in which

the counterfactual is expressed in Chinese, some of which are very different from

those discussed so far. In fact, I find the entire issue of different counterfactualmarkers curiously absent from both Bloom's and Au's discussions. As mentioned

earlier, there are many ways of expressing counterfactuality in Chinese, and an

exhaustive examination of them is well outside the scope of this paper (as well asbeing beyond my ability to present). I will briefly raise a few relevant issues, with

hopes of expanding on this point at a later time. (Those with no knowledge of

Chinese might wish to skip this section.)


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Consider the following counterfactual sentence by the Chinese playwright

Lao She:

Jiaruo zhe xianxiang bing bu cunzai, women de xiqu gaige gongzuo dao xianzai

jiu yiding hui you geng duo ren canjia.

(If this phenomenon were not so, there would have been [up to now] many morepeople taking part in the task of reforming traditional opera.)

Even though there is no one specific marker anywhere in the sentence whichunambiguously marks the utterance as counterfactual, the various grammatical

markers for tense and aspect jiaruo (if, supposing), dao xianzai (up to

now, a time marker), jiu (then, therefore), yiding hui (definitely

would/may/might) when taken together, mark the sentence as counterfactualjust as clearly as the presence of would have does in English. A Chinese speaker

encountering this sentence is compelled to adopt a counterfactual interpretation

because of the various counterfactual cues working in consort. One might say that

counterfactuality in a Chinese sentence is sometimes more diffuse, more spreadout than in a corresponding English sentence. It is true that the counterfactuality

of a Chinese sentence is usually more context-dependent (that is, fewercounterfactual cues are employed), but sentences such as the one above, in which

there really is no ambiguity, are also common.

Consider this sentence from a Taiwanese comic book:

Yaobushi laoban chu mian, zao jiu ba nimen lia song guanfu le.

(If the boss hadn't come out, [I] would have sent you both to the authorities long

ago.)

The yaobushi (if not for the fact that...) clearly carries a strong feeling of past

tense counterfactuality to a Chinese speaker, and the zao jiu (earlier/already +then) which follows makes it even more clear that the sentence is to be interpreted

counterfactually.

Phrases like danyuan (if only, I wish) and wo yuanyi zuo (I wish Iwere..., literally I'm willing to be... as in wo yuanyi zuo yi zhi xiao yang..., I

wish I were a little lamb) have strong counterfactual associations, and are

probably about as strongly counterfactual as a phrase in English like If I had my

own room..., which has a strong default counterfactual interpretation, but whichcan also express simple past tense, as in I don't remember my early childhood, but

if I had my own room, then I'm sure my older brother was jealous.

Of course, absolutely any counterfactual in Chinese can be made explicitby prefacing it with Time word + X is not the case, if X is the case... It is true

that the counterfactual nature of a sentence in Chinese must typically be gleaned

with much more meager cues, but there are a surprising number of ways in whichthe counterfactual can be strongly evoked or indicated, most of which bear little

resemblance to structures that signal counterfactuality in English. Neither Bloom

nor Au deal with this issue in their studies.


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4. Problems with Bloom's contention that Chinese who know English did better on

his tests because of their exposure to the English conditional

The most obvious problem with this contention of Bloom's is that there isno way to separate knowledge of English from general educational level. Chinese

who are better educated have, perforce, a better knowledge of English; there

simply does not exist a control group of highly-educated yet totally monolingualsubjects. This means that in the tests where Bloom compared the results from a

group of hotel workers in Taiwan to those of students at Taiwan National

University, the higher scores of the university students might have merely reflectedtheir educational level rather than their exposure to English. These students also

presumably would have been more accustomed to taking reading-comprehension

tests of all sorts. Being in the academic world themselves, they might have taken a

greater interest in the project and thus would have been more motivated to performwell. Something else to consider is the fact that, education is correlated with

greater exposure to Western ideas and a more easy familiarity with Western

research methods, including, perhaps, tricky pencil-and-paper tests wherein

researchers ask all sorts of seemingly strange and unmotivated questions designedto test a subject's ability to abstract and to reason logically from given premises, no

matter how absurd they may be.

5. Questions of cross-cultural generality

If what Bloom is saying is true, one would expect that similar results could

be found by testing speakers of other languages that lack explicit counterfactualmarkers. Tagalog, for example, is similar to Chinese in this respect,35 though any

proposed tests on native speakers would be subject to the same problems of the

possible confounding of cultural and linguistic effects, as well as to possibleinfluences of other languages, including English.

Actually, Bloom has already repeated at least some of his experiments on

Japanese subjects, with results very similar to those obtained with his Chinesesubjects.36 A moderately complex Japanese version of the Bier paragraph was

given to 151 Japanese college students, with only 40% of them arriving at the

counterfactual interpretation.

Further discussion based on interviews with Chinese

In the discussion that follows, I will present some of my own impressions

and intuitions about various aspects of the issues raised above, based largely onconversations with Chinese friends.

I tend to view all psychological testing with a certain degree of suspicion.

Results can vary enormously from subject to subject, group to group, and situationto situation, and it is virtually impossible to eliminate from the test situation every

factor that might bias the test in one way or another. (I had a friend who used to

say he trusted only psychological tests which were clown-invariant; that is, testsin which the outcome could not possibly be affected by the tester's wearing a

clown suit.) The tests Bloom and Au have done are intriguing and can be

repeated, refined, and extended, but I feel some of their results may have been

affected by the sheer strangeness of the test materials. It would be helpful if in


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future tests the stimulus included both spoken and written materials, and dealt with

examples from more daily, routine linguistic situations, instead of abstract

paragraphs about Eighteenth-century German philosophers and African cannibals(some of Bloom's points notwithstanding).

The Bier paragraphThere are a number of possible reasons for Bloom's results on the Bier

paragraph, and there is no reason to think any one of them is most important. His

results could be due to a confluence of effects, some linguistic, some cultural. Ihave informally given many Chinese friends the Bier paragraph (as well as

Bloom's other tests), and questioned them at great length afterward, and it still is

not clear to me exactly what's going on. My impression is that Chinese speakers

do not arrive at a counterfactual reading of the entire paragraph as quickly andeffortlessly as Americans reading the English translation do, but they do almost

invariably arrive at it. The interesting thing is that after they do, they still often

balk at opting for answer 5 (the only one consistent with the counterfactual reading

of the paragraph) for other reasons having to do with subtle assumptions about thenature of the test.

I gave the Bier paragraph to a Taiwanese student, Chen, who chose answer1 (a non-counterfactual response) as the correct answer. I then tape-recorded his

explanation as to why he had chosen that response.

Chen: It stresses here that he investigated the principles of the universe and thelaws of nature. So I think the first answer is more appropriate...uh, to the subject, I

mean, all the questions. Therefore he led Western philosophers to pay attention

to ... because he specialized in this aspect ... the principles of nature, therefore heled Western philosophers to pay attention to natural phenomena as individual

entities. [At this point he goes on to explain why he rejected answers 2, 3, and 4.]

Me: How about number 5?Chen: Number 5 isn't anything. If the above four answers are not appropriate...

Me: Uh-huh. So what's wrong with number 5?

Chen: (Somewhat peeved) What's number 5? It means you only...only chooseanswer number 5 if you don't agree with the other four.

Me: Uh-huh.

Chen: So I already agreed with an answer ... there's absolutely no reason to

consider number 5. [He goes on to explain this a bit more.]Me: But it says...it says clearly that Bier couldn't speak Chinese...

Chen: Hm.

Me: ...couldn't speak Chinese. So how could he influence...uh, Westernphilosophers?

Chen: No, no, no, no. He liked to...he...you still don't understand. Right here it

says, Eighteenth-century philosopher...Me: Uh-huh.

Chen: He liked to study stars [he says the word in English], you know, that sort of

... natural laws. Meaning he originally in Germany, he produced his own books.


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Here is the reaction of another Taiwanese friend, Pei, who also had just

chosen answer 1 as the correct response:

Me: So why did you choose number one?

Pei: Uh, because I just saw this phrase, uh, created a theory which not only [bu

jin in the Chinese text]...explained natural phenomena as individual entities, butwhich also made clear their interrelationships. This gave me an...an impression

[she says the word in English] that he...he at that point, because he didn't

understand Chinese, therefore he was only able to explain natural phenomena asindividual entities, but if he had been able to understand Chinese, he would have

also been able to make clear their interrelationships.39

Her response is typical of the kinds of things my Chinese friends say whenthey try to evaluate this paragraph. Here Pei opts for a rather unlikely

interpretation based upon a slight ambiguity in the wording of the text. It is

technically possible that the phrase ...and [would] have created a theory which not

only explained natural phenomena as individual entities, but which also made cleartheir interrelationships is implying that Bier did at some time succeed in creating

a theory which only explained natural phenomena as entities, but thatinterpretation is, of course, wildly improbable, given the overall tone of the

paragraph. But note here that Pei understood very well that Bier couldn't speak

Chinese and obviously knew that the implications were all hypothetical, given that

supposition. Subsequent questioning revealed that she had simply assumed thather solution was exactly the kind of interpretive trick that was expected of her, and

that answer number 5 was included as the obvious correct answer for those

unwary test-takers prone to jump to hasty solutions rather than searching a littlelonger for the more correct answer. And, again, what bolstered her decision was

the assumption that the paragraph couldn't possibly be only about what Bier might

have done. What confused Pei was not the counterfactual language of theparagraph, but the overall intent of the test.

This situation is reminiscent to me of the famous series of experiments by

Kahneman and Tversky which probed the way people apply, or don't apply,statistical principles and rules of deduction in everyday situations.40 In one

experiment, subjects were given a brief description of an individual named Linda,

who is thirty-one years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in

philosophy in college, and as a student she was deeply involved in issues ofdiscrimination and social justice. She also participated in antinuclear

demonstrations. Given this information, subjects were then asked to rank, from

most probable to least probable, a series of statements which included these two:Linda is a bank teller, and Linda is a feminist bank teller. From a logical

standpoint, it is much more probable that Linda is a bank teller than that Linda is

both a bank teller and a feminist. The question reduces simply to Which is moreprobable, x alone or x and y? Yet more than 80% of subjects, including some

who were versed in statistics, thought it more probable that Linda was both a bank

teller and a feminist. One of the conclusions drawn by Kahneman and Tversky is


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that people are not very good at applying simple logical principles to everyday

situations.

These studies are interesting and much discussed in psychological circles, but I, for one, take exception to this particular conclusion about the results. It

seems obvious to me that in such test situations people assume, with some

justification, that the information being given to them is being provided for areason; that they are to use it somehow in reasoning or reaching a conclusion. To

choose the possibility that Linda is a bank teller only over the possibility that she is

also a feminist seems to render the information given about Linda largelyirrelevent. The inclusion of a list of Linda's attributes seems to indicate that the

operative questions are things like Is Linda more likely to be a non-feminist bank

teller or a feminist bank teller? or How likely is it that Linda is a feminist?

Otherwise, why provide the information? Similarly, I think it is possible thatBloom's Chinese subjects, given certain cultural biases, were simply operating on a

very strong assumption -- namely that the information given to them in the

paragraph must have had relevance to something Bier actually did, for otherwise

the whole exercise would be somewhat pointless.Interestingly, one of Bloom's own experiments provides more evidence for

the contention that differences in performance on such tests can come about notfrom language-based comprehension problems but from subjects' default

assumptions about the nature of the test materials. Bloom gave 159 Taiwanese

subjects, 68 Hong Kong subjects, and 112 American subjects the following

question in their native language:

Everyone has his or her own method for teaching children to respect morality.

Some people punish the child for immoral behavior, thereby leading him to fearthe consequences of such behavior. Others reward the child for moral behavior,

thereby leading him to want to behave morally. Even though both of these

methods lead the child to respect morality, the first method can lead to somenegative psychological consequences --- it may lower the child's self-esteem.

According to the above paragraph, what do the two methods have in common?Please select only one answer.

A. Both methods are useless.

B. They have nothing in common, because the first leads to negative psychologicalconsequences.

C. Both can reach the goal of leading the child to respect morality.

D. It is better to use the second.E. None of the above answers makes sense. (If you choose this answer, please

explain.)41

97% of the American subjects chose C as the correct answer, a seemingly

obvious choice since that answer is given explicitly in the paragraph. Yet only

55% of the Taiwanese subjects and 65% of the Hong Kong subjects responded

with answer C. Why the difference? Bloom's analysis of the results is interesting:


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Most of the remaining Chinese-speaking subjects chose D or E and then went on to

explain, based

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