Image: Illustration by Tom Whalen
In Brief
- People communicate using a multitude of languages that vary considerably in the information they convey.
- Scholars have long wondered whether different languages might impart different cognitive abilities.
- In recent years empirical evidence for this causal relation has emerged, indicating that one’s mother tongue does indeed mold the way one thinks about many aspects of the world, including space and time.
- The latest findings also hint that language is part and parcel of many more aspects of thought than scientists had previously realized.
I am standing next to a five-year old girl in pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York in northern Australia. When I ask her to point north, she points precisely and without hesitation. My compass says she is right. Later, back in a lecture hall at Stanford University, I make the same request of an audience of distinguished scholars—winners of science medals and genius prizes. Some of them have come to this very room to hear lectures for more than 40 years. I ask them to close their eyes (so they don’t cheat) and point north. Many refuse; they do not know the answer. Those who do point take a while to think about it and then aim in all possible directions. I have repeated this exercise at Harvard and Princeton and in Moscow, London and Beijing, always with the same results.
A five-year-old in one culture can do something with ease that eminent scientists in other cultures struggle with. This is a big difference in cognitive ability. What could explain it? The surprising answer, it turns out, may be language.
This article was originally published with the title How Language Shapes Thought.
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51 Comments
Add CommentWittgenstein anyone?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI would think that environment has more to do with it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople who speak certain languages are much more likely
to come from rural environments. Such as the aborigine.
I'll bet most american farm boys can do it pretty consistently whereas someone raised in an urban environment might have difficulty.
Having been raised in Michigan as a farm boy and outdoorsman I have directional awareness in my head all the time without thinking about it and I speak
the same language as many of the scientist studied.
PS I get lost in the Mall and my wife can find her
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisway around effortlessly,and we speak the same language.
Yes, because science is a matter of personal experience and casual opinion. I'm kind of sick of people replying to a solid bit of research someone has obviously put a lot of time and effort into with "Actually, I think...blah blah blah" It's a really self entitled aspect of our culture that's bred from having ubiquitous 'comments' sections.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt's not Wittgenstein as much as Whorf/Sapir.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@Rodestar - Yes, the counter-examples seem powerful - but in the simple (and possibly, imperfect) case of "naming direction.
@EAMravunac - I STRONGLY agree with the issue of "self-entitlement" which seems to have been expanded and solicited since the end of WWII. (NB cf excellent commentary by Jean Sheperd on this)
This specific bit of "scientific reporting" follows the T&A standards of this blog -- the actual scientific evidence is months old, and does not prove, or make a very defensible argument for "language molding thought" as indicated by 'directional language'. The cultural and overt learning/training is clearly a major imprinter for this behavior.
However, this being said, the evidence for Language defining the nature of our reality is a fairly complex and subtle mixture. Clearly, man cannot think of what he cannot think of -- but this is more than a tautology. Having the word for an activity or object which is peculiar to a specific culture is NOT the evidence. The way we put logic together is a function of how we put language together - Western languages (Greek, Semitic, Romance) have verb "to be" which connotes an existence separate from the object -- this has a profound influence on how Western-languages are used to describe "reality", and, subsequently, how these speakers perceive reality.
Your simple analogy is more correct than the scientific one. A person who spends a lot of time outside can quickly point to North, East, South, or West with no problem, and they can even give you a very close estimate of the time of day. You put that person in a room where they cannot see the Sun and they are lost.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI wonder if the author of this article took that into consideration, or if she was even aware of that fact?
Very well said. The comments section on scientific or philosophical articles is becoming much like the comments section of YouTube videos, but with better spelling.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLet us be wary of proof by analogy of experience -- Global Climate Change is obviously untrue because it is still cold in the winter, and last summer it was colder on average than the previous summer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLocal divergencies are not cumulative proofs.
Just because you maybe a distinguished scholar—winner of science medals and genius prizes means very little when common sense is needed to be applied, most have little as you have proven. It also proves that most scholars only know what is written in books not real life expirences.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere are strong arguments for this.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe think of ice, water, and steam as different things. Actually all are H2o. Solid, liquid, and gas should be adjectives for H2o.
Many examples are not so obvious.
Since nouns are object referring words, we tend to instinctively believe what we talk about must somehow "exist". That gives rise to a lot of New Age metaphysics.
Then there are universals like the "football team" which refers to an abstraction. Only the players exist.
There must surely be more to this "experiment" than is described here. It is not at all surprising that someone can point north while situated in familiar surroundings, nor is it at all surprising that those situated indoors in unfamiliar surroundings (such as lecture halls and conference rooms) cannot, regardless of what language they speak. Personally, I can point to north from anywhere in my house, from anywhere in my neighborhood, and in fact, if I can see the sky clearly, from anywhere at all. Yet I'm a non-aboriginal American and I speak English just like you do.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis may be a trick: I seem to recall recently reading about a, I think it was Australian Aboriginal, language that had no words for left, right, etc. Directions were always given relative to the poles/direction of rotation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTERENCE MCKENNA ANYONE?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTERENCE MCKENNA ANYONE?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm not convinced the genius prizes people in Beijing had the same directional failure as the genius prizes people @ Stanford; but, I expect had the aboriginal girl been setting in the audience of distinguished scholars her directional error rate would regress toward the scholarly mean (perhaps Lera Boroditsky could bring the girl along to the next lecture to science medals winners & find out).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWe know what we need to know (generally speaking, in a stable environment). R.C.
Hmmm well being an engineer instead of an academic
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat i see and experience seems to be pretty much
concrete evidence to me but you are free to substitute
your reality if you would like...You people are free
to waste time and energy and money in pursuit of a doctorate but unfortunately I am forced to deal with what works and what don't.
I would agree that language effects the way people think but I would propose that language is formed by
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisenvironment. Language,environment, and individual are
all the result of a co-evolutionary process.....
.....Just the thoughts of an uneducated engineer....
I am sorry ...I should have realized that if you are
not an academic your thoughts are irrelevant...
....You people make me smile and shake my head.
The claims of the Articles are empty, meaningless and circular.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn my view
[1] Our ability to experience the world, recall and analyze it remains independent of language.
[2] However our ability to express and articulate that experience precisely and accurately does depend on the medium (the langauge), acts of coding/ decoding and shared meaning between sender and receiver.
Claiming that knowledge transfer is influenced by the communication and that culturally relevant vocabulary is closely modeling culturally biased viewpoint is sort of meaningless and empty. Those facts are derived from the definition. More importantly we can NOT make any claims on how the cognition itself is affected especially while person is experiencing or recalling or analyzing it.
I recently blogged on my company's website about this. Where I give counter arguments sort of paragraph for paragraph.
Though not a long post - For the lack of space here I would urge you to visit blogs.watechresources.com and see my post about this topic.
(please try to keep comments focused on science issues and impersonal.We all sincerely care about the subject.)
JamesDavis...well put...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI read your blog and I will say I couldn't agree
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswith you more. I would also say that your need to
understand language processing pursuant to writing a
computer program for translating language is understandable and would make your theories testable.
Another interesting aspect of this discourse is that
If you read my statement that language,environment,and
individual are co-evolutionary I am saying the same
thing that you are saying. Your choice of language makes your exact meaning much clearer. Whereas mine
although much simpler and very clear to me . May be
ambiguous to a reader....Isn't language a wonderfull
thing.
Anthropologists and archaeologists think that for the primitive tribes, the ability to fight for a symbol, e.g. a flag, equally as for a real object, was an advantageous behavior. It's no surprise that our mind handles and considers equally the thing in the outside or inner world, its representation or the word naming it
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCogito ergo sum! I am thinking that's the only thing I can be sure about. But I can only assume that the world I'm sensing is real and that you are also probably sensing the same world. I can only imagine and "simulate" your experience when you use language to tell me something. Immanuel Kant resolved this issue by using concept of a priori knowledge. -We have instinctual knowledge of space and time.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'll go one step further ... Let us assume a few things and then try a thought experiment.Let's turn the argument around and open Pandora's box
ASSUMPTIONS (or a priori knowledge)
Assumption 1: We must use Verbs to describe world. Things are the way they are or they change.(i.e stative verbs/action verbs)
Assumption 2 : When things change they either undergo transformation or someone acts on them.
- That change must happen in "Time", at a "Place" and in certain "Manner".
- An "Agent" acts and some "Object" is affected.
- These are the salient features of "Action"
- There might be a "Reason" for the action and an "Instrument" might be used.
Let's call these 'Salient Slots'.
(These are more or less various cases described in classical latin, sanskrit and greek.)
Assumption 3: The sentence must have a "verbal center" and can fill one or more of the slots with a phrase leaving other unspecified and must fix "Tense", "Aspect" and "Mood" (possibility/necessity)
HYPOTHESIS: All humans share this same a priori knowledge and it forms the schema or "instruction set" to analyze,understand,code decode and imagine information transmitted though use of language- in short to "derive meaning". Therefore all languages despite their superficial differences must be equally capable and must be expressing same underlying meaning.
PANDORA'S BOX WHEN WE DENY THE HYPOTHESIS.
1.There are some languages that are "smarter" than others.If yes I should better start using the smartest language. I already think Indo-aryan languages are the best and english and chinese are the dumbest.(I can give long list of why)
2. Better yet I can "design" a language that makes me and my fellow language speakers super smart. Better yet sell the product and become zillionaire. Wait, wait - I can also file a patent and stop you from being smart. "Method & apparatus to enhance cognitive capabilities through carefully arranged symbol mapping of spatio-temporal imagary extracted from verbal communication"
3. Langauge preservation is all non-sense. Those idiots should learn chinese/russian/english/foo/blah/ "sachinease".
(same post at blogs.watechresources.com)
I guess that what Immanuel Kant wrote about was an inner sensibility, not a previously existent knowledge; it´s obvious that nervous system handles information, but we are the ones able to see the connection between the retina and image perception, at the end in an eye there are just amino acids, carbohydrates, fats and so on. Nabokov, the author of "Lolita", said that the inner perception of time is a marker of the presence of God, the romans considered Chronos master of time, but marijuana does slow time flow perception, there is no evidence that time existed at all before the Big Bang, speed of travel slows time flow and animals seem having some kind of internal clock or CNS pacemaker, just as computers do. What a mesh !
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting article, and well written, with one exception: as described, the distinguished scholars being unable to point north proves nothing. You subsquently explain the real issue, but initially, you ignore that inside a building, it's easy to get turned around and lose track of compass directions. I've never failed to find north while outdoors (sometimes with a little effort), but without a specific reason to do so, I would have no reason keep track of compass directions indoors. The problem is context and goals, not language.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMore interesting (and relevant to SciAm readers) examples are abundant. First, consider the synthetic languages used in computer programming. Programmers who think in assembler, BASIC, and C++ will take radically different approaches to thinking about, codifying, and solving an identical problem -- because each of these languages prohibits (or makes prohibitively difficult) thinking about other approaches.
Another example comes in how the language of mathematics and science (applied mathematics) differs from the language of social construction (a much abused philosophy with fascinating insights for those willing to consider the principles rather than the politics). The two discourse communities have nearly incompatible ways of thinking about the world, making communication at best difficult. Far from being an issue of merely academic concern, this has serious consequences in the field of risk communication: scientists who can only communicate in the language of science cannot successfully persuade the general public that a risk is real because the rhetorical factors and language differ too greatly.
Finally, consider how differently statisticians, using the linguistic tools of their language ("statistics"), think compared with the general public when it comes to assessing risks (e.g., death in an airplane crash) and probabilities (e.g., lotteries). Two entirely different worlds.
Each example is crucially important for scientists to understand. Science is neither conducted in a social vacuum nor is it immune to social pressures. For scientists to successfully communicate key policy issues to politicians and the public, they must learn their audience's language well enough to change how they think about and communicate a problem. That's no longer optional; it may have become crucial to our survival as a species.
Geoffrey Hart (www.geoff-hart.com)
ghart@videotron.ca / geoffhart@mac.com
Fellow, Society for Technical Communication (STC)
Lera Boroditsky’s article, “How Language Shapes Thought” falls short in its claim to offer empirical evidence supporting the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Although it is reasonable that a person who is literate in Hebrew will lay out playing cards right to left, it is a huge stretch to say that Hebrew speakers “organize time” differently from English speakers. Other holes in Boroditsky’s article are claims that Mandarin speaking children are better at math because they speak Mandarin, and that Finnish speaking children are slow at recognizing their own genders because they speak Finnish. The attraction of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it seems to offer easy explanations for complex cultural differences. Certainly, language is an important instrument of thought and deserves study. Boroditsky’s study however is looking at superficialities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this----John Koethen
In answer to jtdwyer, what you are referring to sounds like a research paper by Deutscher, which was discussed on the Johnson blog (a blog about language) at the Economist newspaper. The link is
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thiswww.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/09/language_and_thought
It provides a further link to Deutscher's paper which is very similar in vein to this article. My comment under the name "Trapperjohn" takes issue with his woolly reasoning.
As for this article:
This is essentially an argument between engineering, outdoorsy types and academic types who haven't got in touch with their hunter-gatherer side. Rodestar99 is so clearly right on this. My comment (link above) totally backs him up. I won't ramble on here because I rambled on there, but the story (about a natural sense of direction supposedly inculcated by language and not experience) is a carbon copy of this one so it holds for this article.
I am a big fan of Steven Pinker's books.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn his book "Stuff of Thought" he clearly explains the "Language is an Instinct" view and in my view makes a very strong argument of against the Linguistic Relativity. If you haven't read them or aren't familiar with idea of "universal grammar" then you should read them.
I have added links to interesting books that explain the topic
http://blogs.watechresources.com/2011/01/how-language-shapes-thought-take-2.html
(Actually I had bookmarked link to the comprehensive searchable database of language universals. Very interesting! I can't find the book mark now. Will add it later)
As for this Article my objections are at
http://blogs.watechresources.com/2011/01/how-language-shapes-thought.html
@Rodestar99
Yes I was saying exactly the same thing and I like you said in 'my langauge'.
@jgrosay
I have a copy of "Critique of Pure Reason" that I haven't opened in years. But if i understood it correctly back then, then what he meant was that space and time are necessary ingredients of our understanding (cognition) of reality. In my world view I do believe in such things as "evolutionary psychology" so it made sense that we might have some 'a priori' knowledge & Because there are reflexes babies are born with.It is our discrete mind that has created integers and struggles with concepts like infinity and finds it hard to believe that electron can be at one place at the same time. It is the same architecture of our mind that tries to prove completeness of mathematics and gets upset with Godel theorem. Mata physics (what is knowledge, how we get it etc) is not very far from Cognitive Science.It is the same mind that tries to ask "what was before big bang?". We can't escape the fact that we can't think without space and time.It is as concrete as feeling of "I" with in me.Can't escape it.All I am saying is what is we should further assume that we think in terms of verbs(events/changes) and how it connects the other things(nouns) with cases http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case#Indo-European_languages
@geoffhart1962
I disagree with your analogy with computer languages. first they are formal in mamathematical sense and underlying theory is mathematically based See:"Automata theory". They are "languages" similar the the way Mathematical formulas follow a langauge. Some formalisms are better than others Eg. Laplace transform is easier for Diff Eqns. Or Faynman's drawings are better than integral mess. So on ...
I suppose that aboriginal girl was at home. There I can also do it pretty well. No surprise there. But in a strange city, can she do it there too?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOh is he "more correct"? What's that based on? Did you read the entire article? Are you familiar with these studies?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is not about the sun. Being indoors and not being able to see the sun has nothing to do with it, as has been proven.
@Ronnie: Labeling entire groups of far more studied people than yourself as not having "common sense" - in regards to language, ironically, while you machine gun more than a half dozen grammaring and spellatical errors in your two sentence comment - is, um, let me think... funny.
I'm so tired of the battle cry: "It's just common sense!" Okay sure, then what have you done? What have you published? Why aren't you creating works that are considered as significant in propelling our understanding of the brain forward?
Oh yeah, I forgot: there's stuff on TV.
Thank you for reminding me why I love education so much.
My son just demonstrated to me the easiest way to peel a banana. He said "That's how monkeys do it." What does that tell us about our knowledge of nature and the world vs. that of monkeys? And how did my son learned this new piece of knowledge? -- He saw it on a web site. Can Monkeys learn from the Internet?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAs a fluent Spanish and English speaker, it is obvious to me that I, personally, think differently when discoursing in English rather than Spanish. My ways of looking at the world, of analyzing data, of socializing are all markedly different when operating in one language, as compared to the other.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe thesis of this article makes absolute sense to me, but it is a difficult one to prove through experiment. Still, the author's research seems respectable enough.
Very interesting research!! Anyone who knows, or even studies, more than one language understands this, as it is part of the art of translation. However the statement that 'in Russian the verb would reveal my gender'{the gender of the subject} does not reflect the way the conjugation of the Russian verb is formed. The Russian verb is very complex, but not related to gender. Russian verbs come in two aspects: (imperfective & perfective); three tenses: (present, past & future); two conjugations in the present tense; two voices: (active & passive); three moods: (indicative, imperative & conditional); four participle forms: {present (active, passive), past (active, passive)}; two forms of gerund: (present, past). Not to mention it is conjugated for six subject persons.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince Russian is also a declined language, the nouns have even more to do. They do have to worry about gender-- and there are three of them.
Lots of people know Russian. Few know the languages of New Guinea. It is important to fact check so that new information is seen as reliable.
Recently I saw a very interesting documentary on National Geographic called "Human Ape". Everyone knows we share almost 98-99% of DNA with the chimpanzee. The documentary explores how similar are we with chimpanzee. At least for me it was an eye opener. (If you are genuinely interested I urge you to watch it when you have spare time.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIn reality we are very very alike. Except that we learn blindly following elders and we have a better intuitions about physics. At least to me this was a clear indication that we have an innate understanding of physics (i.e we have a physics "module") that we must be using in
understanding language. (Is this that a priori knowledge I was talking about?)
Here are the relevant parts of documentary...
part 5 of 10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us7q6brPAPA
part 6 of 10 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQQHCai3yUk&feature=related
Here is a complete documentary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz6IxZsLwlo&feature=&p=E5D666AC49E24D56&index=0&playnext=1
Just to side track : I recommend watching "Journey of Man: A Genetic Odyssey" to see how human flexibility/creativity of brain and knowledge sharing has made us uniquely human.
No language == apes/primates for millions of years
Spoken language == human stone-age/ iron-age
Written language == classical civilization and rise of cities
Printed books == renaissance
Internet == what's next?
)
This article is simply wrong.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI've read two of Steve Pinker books on language (The Stuff of Thought and The Language Instinct) and I recalled that he simply bust this theory that languages shape thought.
Please observe another opinion from the Economist: (http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/07/language_and_thought_0)
" Today, Whorfianism is a minority position in psycholinguistics (however common it may be among laypeople). Steven Pinker gives Whorfianism a kicking in his Language Instinct and subsequently in The Stuff of Thought. A few psychologists of language have fought back claiming to demonstrate Whorfian effects in the lab, such as Lera Boroditsky. Critics retort that some of this work has failed to replicate."
So it's basically saying that this author is regarded as a minority in the field which results failed to replicate. Readers should be aware of that.
Duh . . . Obviously, thought shapes language first. Without thought, there can be no language because language is the code we use to transmit our thoughts to others.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEven animals transmit auditory or visual signals to communicate their "thoughts" - danger, contentment anger, etc. Only AFTER we have learned a language, it can SEEM to color our thoughts.
This article is just another example of someone learning more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing.
This article follows my letter published in Newscientist explaining exactly how language gives rise to thought.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSee also abstract in Toward a Science of Consciousness on internet. Peter Reynolds Reflectogenesis@hotmail.co.uk
What else exists beside language?
Can anyone tell me?.....see difficult isn't it.
An interesting article spoiled for me by the comment on Russian verbs in the first person betraying gender and the comment on the lack of transparency in the English words eleven and thirteen ( 12 and 13 surely).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisActually it is quite easy to point out pretty much everything exists irregardless of language. Perhaps you didn't express yourself well. It is like the tired and mentally feeble cliche: "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?". Clearly the impact creates sound waves which are the very definition of sound. If there are no ears to hear the sound wave, it still exists. Only a self absorbed nit thinks that the sound wave can only exists if a human is physically present.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLikewise, everything including the neural signals we choose to label "thought" exist without language. Language is simply the medium we use to transmit our thoughts in a structured manner. You have to have thoughts before you can structure them. That is why I dream in images and not words or text.
To bucketofsquid:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisVery well said!
I find this to be too true, and
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisstill cant believe it.
where are they?
Though I am by no means a linguist, but just my amateur reading on the subject has made it obvious to me that there is more to the story. I think it's important to point out that what's stated in this article is not "common sense" and also not in line with what the majority of linguists would say the relationship between culture, thought, and language. I'd like to hear the author say more about how her ideas relate to the mainstream of linguistic research.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy understanding was that the Sapir/Whorf was discredited not only because there wasn't enough evidence, but also because the evidence didn't prove what it was purporting to prove: i.e. that language is all culture all the way down, and that as such, the ways that people from different cultures understand the world are fundementally relative.
Most linguists today think that language is an evolved, biological function of our species, and for that reason, the building block of any grammatical idea (I, go, home, tomorrow) are the same for all people. Certainly, because language changes socially over time, it fills in nuances in different ways, but just because people talk about time or relative location differently doesn't mean that they fundamentally conceive of time and space differently: tomorrow is still tomorrow; yesterday is still yesterday.
I didn't necessarily get the impression that the author was claiming the radical version of the Sapir/Whorf theory to now be true, but I do think that many readers (like myself a couple years ago) would happily infer that conclusion. The cultural relativism of thought is an appealing idea to a lot of non-linguists because it carries a lot of philosophical baggage. For that reason, I think it's important that the author put her ideas within the context of the discourse of her profession.
Although I think this author is way off base, I would make the following observation on what you said about "tomorrow is still tomorrow; yesterday is still yesterday."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving spent 4 years in Africa, 2 in the Democratic Republic of Congo and 2 in Kenya, and having learned the Tshiluba language moderately well in the Congo, I learned that they consider yesterday to be before them while they consider tomorrow to be behind them.
Their logic is, that the past is visible to us while the future is invisible to us.
I found that to be interesting.
I think it is not related with any special cognitive difference. It is the skill which one has learned. My son can immediately tell the day if any date of any year (about 10 years+/-) is asked. He is now 8 yr old and has been doing it for last 1 year. Otherwise he is not at par with his age group in other social and academic activities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think it is not related with any special cognitive difference. It is the skill which one has learned. My son can immediately tell the day if any date of any year (about 10 years+/-) is asked. He is now 8 yr old and has been doing it for last 1 year.He is good in tables and simple maths as addition, subtraction etc. Otherwise he is not at par with his age group in other social and academic activities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe way motor skill can be mastered by even animals, the brain can master certain "cognitive skills" such as calender memory, tables, telling the direction etc.
A fascinating subject with some interesting revelations, particularly with respect to how humans of different languages interact with their environment. This is of interest to me in my work, which involves user intefaces. I'm curious about a couple of conclusions that have been made by Dr. Boroditsky's team. In addition to this article I've watched a video of a presentation that was made to an audience of scientists. One conclusion was made relating to how bilingual subjects react differently depending upon which language they're speaking at the time. In this study this was in response to a preference for "up" being associated with "early", and "down" with "late." There was no mention of whether the bilingual subjects questioned in English had Mandarin as their first language and the subjects question in Mandarin had English as their first language, or was it always a mixture. I would expect this to have some bearing on the result.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOf more interest to me was the conclusion apparently made that we Westerners are more self-centered than the Pormpuraaw Aboriginies. This because we think of direction in terms of left, right, front and back, whereas the Aboriginies are oriented to the direction of the sun's path across the sky. The conclusion was based on the fact that westerners consistently place representations of "early" to the left of a series, and "late" to the right of a series, while the Aboriginies place "early" to the east, and "late to the west, regardless of the direction they're facing. The conclusion that westerners are more self-centered seems to display a lack of skepticism on the part of Boroditsky's team. Is it possible westerners simply appear self-centered because of the way we have adapted to our world, just as the Aboriginies have to theirs? To test this I propose another experiment. Take two small teams playing sandlot football. Instruct the captain to draw every play on the ground. Have the captain face away from the opponents part of the time, and toward the opponents part of the time while drawing the play. Wouldn't we expect even a westerner to draw the play relative to the positions of the teams on the field, and not relative to the direction the captain is facing? If so, this would indicate that our having a language hasn't necessarily made us self-centered, but that we are simply adapting to the tools we have created to organize our environment.
From a fiction writer's standpoint, I have been taught to establish the quirks of language first. This will give insight to unique thought processes and societal quirks that differ from (I'm an American) our cultural norm and that provide a concrete basis upon which my readers can suspend reality.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisChildren learn language first, and from that, they build their culture.
This is a fascinating article that confirms my beliefs as a fiction writer. Thank you.
I am no psychologist or linguist, but I am a curious kind, so I actually read the research paper that describes the experiment with bilingual chinese students. I also watched the video of Long Now talk by Lera. And frankly speaking I'm less certain of the validity and relevance of the research now than before.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisPeople having different reaction times after being primed with different spacial metaphors for time proves nothing.That does not prove people think "fundamentally" different about time, casualty because of language map time to spacial direction differently.
To begin with I am very very reluctant to even accept the notion that time is an abstract concept. You can not see it but you sure sense it. You have a sense of "here and now" and that of your past and the future. World changes around us including ourselves. Things move, fall, grow, die, flow, spread, gather, decay. Things change fast, slow, suddenly, eventually, sometimes, every time, seldom. We understand the world by understanding how it changes. It is impossible to even start talking about change without time. Time is concrete, ever present and most importantly is ordered or directional (past is always before present and present is always before future.)
I really really fail to understand any connection between (a) mapping time to one of the spacial direction (b) how I understand the tense/aspect/mood which is the primary way I understand time.
Consider for a moment completely contrived sentence below. Observe how "act of explaining" is means different things with reference to time. Here you go:
What I am about to explain, may be will turn out to be a good explanation, but then I don't know whether it has always been explained like this or not, so what makes me explain once again is the hitherto unexplained connection between my way of referencing time and how it affects tenses-the primary way of explaining causality,possibility-the comprehension of time.
(Things -in this case "explaining"- that are about to happen, things that will happen but uncertain. Things someone made happen. Things that have always happened. Things that have not happened so far.Happening again.)
My native language Marathi (with 90 million native speakers, 14th by number of speakers) has over 60+ different tenses. So do other languages.
I invite you to read my counter argument for the whole left-right confusion on my blog.
http://blogs.watechresources.com/2011/01/how-language-shapes-thought.html
http://blogs.watechresources.com/2011/01/how-language-shapes-thought-take-2.html
I would like to read all article, but it's open only two paragraphs. Please help me to rad it.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting how defensive Western people get when one questions their intelligence. Clearly one's language reflects one's culture, and the culture is described in terms of language. Probably why so many languages without terms for modern technology, particularly "Wii", "Gameboy", etc. are dying out. If this makes other cultures inferior to ours, or places us above them somehow, I'd say our great scientific advancements have been wasted.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI read the full article. Absolutely fascinating! Ingenious experiments and interesting results. The conclusion is quite telling:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"[H]ow do we know whether differences in language create differences in thought,or the other way around? The answer, it turns out, is both—the way we think influences the way we speak, but the influence also goes the other way."
"[t]he investigators found big shifts in these involuntary automatic biases in bilinguals depending on the language in which they were tested. The Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals, for their part, showed more positive implicit attitudes toward Jews when tested in Hebrew than when tested in Arabic.
Language also appears to be involved in many more aspects than scientists had previously supposed."
"What researchers have been calling “thinking” this whole time actually appears to be a collection of both linguistic and nonlinguistic processes. As a result, there may not be a lot of thinking where language does not play a role.
A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability, the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Research into how the languages we speak shape the way we think is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and construct reality and how we got to be as smart and sophisticated as we are. And this insight, in turn, helps us understand the very essence of what makes us human."
I'm sure the author was aware of this. She mentions experiments with bilinguals during which the subjects behaved differently depending upon the language.
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