Does the language we speak influence the way we think? Scientists have fiercely debated this question for more than a century. A July 1 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences bolsters the case against language’s influence by showing that people with different native tongues organize events in the same order—even if that order is different from the one dictated by their native grammar.
Psychologist Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago asked Chinese, English, Spanish and Turkish speakers to describe activities by using only their hands. Turkish is the only language in the quartet that follows subject, object, verb, or SOV, order (as in “woman knob twists”). The other languages adhere to the pattern subject, verb, object (“woman twists knob”). When gesturing, however, all participants used the SOV order, regardless of their native language. The same was true in a noncommunicative task in which volunteers had to put pictures in order.
The results point to the existence of a “natural order” that humans use when representing events nonverbally, the researchers say. Where such a natural order might come from is unknown, but Goldin-Meadow suggests that it may influence developing languages so that they initially use the SOV order—such is the case with a sign language currently emerging in Israel. Languages are subject to other pressures, however, such as the need to be semantically clear and rhetorically interesting. As a language becomes more complex, she explains, these pressures might push it away from the natural SOV order. Today the two dominant orders that were represented in this study are equally frequent and account for roughly 90 percent of the world’s languages.
One of the possible consequences of a language that goes against our pattern of representation may be that the brain has to do additional work when speaking it, Goldin-Meadow says. “It could be that there is a small cognitive cost to speaking English.”
Note: This story was originally printed with the title, "Common Ground".
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Add CommentOR, it could be that the subjects all had a pre-existing knowledge of the way Charades is played, which is generally in an SOV pattern.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI don't know if I'm either unusual, or am wrong in how I thought I would have behaved were I to have been a participant in the above trial without knowledge of this artical, but I think I'd use SVO not SOV.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAre you suggesting that the entire branch of Indian languages which borrow their grammar from Sanskrit, and largely follow the SOV order are "developing languages" ?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDepending on your system of classification, you have at least 36 and at most 1800 languages that are an exception to this rule.
It strikes me that when forced to use hand signals only, one would (I assume) aim for economy and clarity. Objects are easy to designate with hand signals (point to it, or, if necessary, indicate size and shape and how someone uses it). Verbs might be more vague; maybe the object comes before the verb because in their examples, it's easier to clearly communicate the verb only when there is the context of the object. For the example above, "twist" is easy to communicate when you know already that the action is something that the woman does to the doorknob. The pictures could be a similar situation; I personally have a very hard time when I am supposed to figure out a verb from a picture (in Win,Lose,orDraw games with friends or with Rebus puzzles). The verb could go last because the verb requires the most previous context to clearly communicate. (Also, given what admittedly little I know of ancient Greek and Latin, there are several rhetorical/other reasons for the popularity of SOV besides its "natural-ness." Fascinating, though.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it would be interesting to use this kind of information as well as concepts from mathematics, statistics, data compression, anatomy, and linguistics to develop a completely new language that is easy to learn and speak while getting across the most amount of information in the least amount of time. The basic idea is to increase data transfer both internally and externally.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAltnernatively, speaking English may have a high cognitive pay off by requiring abstraction from the absolute. And it may provide more meaningful communication. E.g. what 'is' the main focus of the sentence? The woman, the knob, or the action of twisting?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this(duplicate post)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is very intesting. I actually just finished reading a book which I beleive was a collection of old Scientific American articles on the "Origin and Developement of Language," or something similar. Anyway, the following should be extremely relevant to this discussion:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe book said that when CREOLE languages develope, they always have certian structures and rules, reguardless of which language they mainly develop from, or the languages that influence them. (CREOLE refers to any language developed by the CHILDREN of transplanted peoples, historically becuase of slavery. In other words, there is no common language, so the kids make their own). I'd have much interest in whether creole languaged indeed follow this SOV structure. Anyone know so I can be lazy enough to not have to look it up? Also, I agree that called other languaged "developing" sounds disrespectful, but perhaps the author just meant to say languages "that developed in such a way."