Language and thought

Relationship of cognition and language

• Categories of cognition are shaped by language– Sapir and Whorf’s linguistic relativity

• Cognitive categories develop independently of language both in evolution and in ontogeny, language only builds upon these– Piaget: cognitive development leads language development

• Language and cognition are independent– Chomsky

• Cognition follows its own path, but language modulates its categories

Early experiments

1. language = thoughtBehaviorism• Watson, 1913: thought =

subvocal speech

2. language ≠ thought

• Smith et al., 1947: curare experiment: muscle relaxant

Political correctness“language use has an effect on the way we think”

• euphemisms in politics– Pacification/pacifikáció = bombázás– Revenue increase/bevételnövelés = adó– Rationalisation/munkaerő-gazdálkodás = elbocsátások

• social movements: sexist/racist etc. language is responsible for sexist/racist etc. thinking– chairman → chairperson

– Gypsy → Roma (?)

– blind → with visual impairment

• Orwell, 1984: Newspeak

Language shapes the mind

• linguistic determinism: a language shapes psychological mechanisms

• Benjamin Lee Whorf• Language shapes the mind, world view, structure of science• Differences in lexical (vocabulary) and grammatical organization

result in different conceptual schemes

Whorf: linguistic determinism and relativity

• Linguist and engineer, student of anthropologist Edward Sapir– Studied native American cultures and languages– Emphasized the variety and differences of cultures, not

the common features• Strong view: all higher forms of thought build on language• Weak view: the structure of the language one generally

uses influences the way they understand their environment and act upon in it

Linguistic relativity (the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

• Follows from linguistic determinism• Linguistic relativity: distinctions encoded in one

language are unique to that language alone, and "there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages”– It is impossible to translate precisely from one language to

another

• lexical and grammatical relativity

Lexical influences• Lexical level: what words are found in a given language,

and what they refer to– different languages carve up the world in different ways

through more or less specialized vocabularies– languages differ with respect to how they divide up the world

into nouns and verbs• lightning: a N in English, but a V in Hopi

– duration an important feature

• Tzotzil Mayan: eat-mushy; eat-a-slender-shape-food, eat-meat

– the properties of objects are incorporated into the verbs

Grammatical influences on thinking• Number category

– whether inanimate nouns can be pluralized or not– in English any noun can be pluralized as long as the referent

is discrete, i.e., mass nouns such as paper, flour cannot be pluralized

• count nouns such as pen, girl

– in Yucatec, only animate nouns can be pluralized– Lucy (1992): English speakers specify the number of objects

in descriptions of line drawings more frequently than Yucatec speakers

Grammatical influences

• Tense markers– determine location of events in time

• past ---------- now ---------- future– he is running– he ran WARI in Hopi– he will run

• How does a temporal language compare to a “timeless language”?

Tense

• Hopi distinguishes between– Reportive: report of a recent or ongoing event– Expective: report of an expected event (past or future)– Nomic (not described)

• According to Whorf these are not tenses because they reflect the epistemic validity of the statement rather than its duration or location in time

Potawatomi inclusive and exclusive pronouns: we

(www.potawatomilang.org)

Hungarian object agreement

• The verb form signals the specificity of the object– Megevett egy almát.– Megette az almát.

Hungarian locativesStatic Goal Source

Interior

(3D)

BAN BA BÓL

Exterior

(2D)

N RA RÓL

Approximate

(dimension neutral)

NÁL HOZ TÓL

Examples

1. snow2. colours3. gender4. spatial language

Snow

Eskimos have many different words for ‘snow’→ evidence that they see snow differently (urban legend!)

→ Boas, (1911): 4• aput („snow on the ground”)• gana („falling snow”)• piqsirpoq („drifting snow”)• qimuqsuq („a snowdrift”)

→ Sapir& Whorf, 1940: 7 → 1978: 50→ 1984 (New York Times): 100

The truth about snow

• There are several Eskimo languages + Eskimo languages differ in the number of expressions they have for snow

• Definition of “word” is problematic – Inuit is a polysynthetic language: are words derived from the same stem

different or not?

• More importantly• Even if it was true that one language had more, is it evidence that

they see snow differently?painters: paintsornithologists: birds

Colors

Basic colour terms(Berlin & Kay, 1969)

• Properties– 1 morpheme– Not restricted to one class of items (e.g. blond)– Do not belong to the scope of another color terms (e.g. torqoise)– Frequently and generally used

• Basic color terms are chosen from 11 colors by all languges: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, pink, purple, orange, grey.

• languages differ in how many basic color terms they have (Hungarian for ‘pink’ rózsaszín is not a basic color term)

• 2 colour terms (mili-mola): Dani, New Guinea

• There seems to be a universal hierarchy of colour categorisation.

black white

red

green yellow

blue

brown

purple pink orange grey

Do speakers of different languages see colors differently?

• Color categories are not arbitrary!• Same everywhere:

– light– Operation of the human eye

• 3 kinds of cones in color perception → these determine what we see

• Experiments (pl. Heider, 1972 – the dani): recalling and discrimination is good for colors—focal colors

Experimental results(pl. Heider & Oliver, 1972; Rosch, 1978, Berlin & Kay 1969,

Kay & Kempton 1984)

• People speaking different languages choose the same shade as best exemplars of a category (focal colours)– The best exemplar of grue in grue languages is the same as the

best exemplar of green in green-blue languages

• Dani do as well as English speakers in non/verbal colour discrimination and memory tasks

• In a free categorization task, different speakers use different categories (those marked in their languages)

Winawer et al 2007

• Russian speakers: faster RT if the two shades are from different linguistic colour categories

• English and Russian speakers– Russian: dark blue/light blue distinction

• A blue shade shown, then two blue shades• Task: which of the two is the same shade as the probe?

Gilbert et al 2006

• If language affects perception, the effect should be stronger for the right visual field

• Task: Which side is the different shade on?

• Variables: – shade difference across or within

linguistic category (blue-green)– Target in left or right visual field

• Results: when different linguistic categories, faster response in RVF

Korean locatives(Bowerman & Choi 1994, 2001)

Korean locatives (Bowerman, 1996)• Korean (vs. English and Hungarian): no linguistic distinction, between

placing an object in a container or on a surface (in vs. on, -ban vs. -on)• Korean language distinguishes between tight fit (ring on a finger,

picture on the wall) and loose fit (fruit in a bowl, object leaning against a wall)– This distinction holds for both containment (in) and support (on)

• Experiments– English/Korean babies differentiate all potential spatial distinctions– As a results of acquiring a language certain spatial distinctions

(those strengthened by language) become salient in representation

Navajo shape classifiers• Carroll and Casagrande: Navajo vs. English

– Navajo verbs change form according to the shape of the object it takes (shape classifiers)

• flexible vs. rigid; flat vs. round– give blue rope and yellow stick and ask which of the two a

blue stick can go with• Navajo choose shape: yellow stick

– English choose color: blue rope– conducted the test with upper class Bostonians

• responded like Navajo children– there is other kinds of determinism than just linguistic

determinism

Grammatical gender and object perception

Experiment(Boroditsky & Schmidt, 2003)

– Spanish, German and English speakers (experiment language: English)

– Training: 24 pairs of object - name

– Test: object word shown, name has to be recalled

Results– For Spanish and German speakers, better recall performance for

pairs where the gender of the name corresponds to the gender of the object word

apple – Paul / Paulabench – Eric / Ericaclock – Karl / Karla

apple – ?bench – ?clock – ?

Spatial reference (Brown 2001)

• Ego-centric (left, right, in front of me, behind me) – relative

• Intrinsic (left of the object, in front of the object, etc)• Geocentric (hill-wise, sea-wise, etc) – absolute

Relative

frontback

left

right

Intrinsic

leftright

front

back

Absolute

North

West

South

East

Tzeltal

• Left „xin” and right „wa’el”– Refer to body parts only

• Absolute reference system:– „alan”: downhill ~North– „ajk’ol”: uphill ~South– Indoors, outdoors

Experiments

• Dutch + Tzeltal speakers (Bowerman, Levinson)

– Seated at talble in a room, shown a pattern– Turned 180 degrees, asked to reproduce pattern

Chips task

Chips task - results

Maze task

Maze - results

Evidence for Relativity?

• Li & Gleitman (2002)– Response depends on environment: the availability of

reference points• Compare cities/varied landscape vs. open landscape

– In a darkened room (no visible reference points), English speakers also use the absolute reference frame

Reference frames and ecological conditions