Does language shape the way we think?

[arkain101]

Is there some elements in the function of language, that play a role in shaping the way we think?

 

 

 

 

 

 

I would like to open with an article

 

Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky

 

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

 

LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.

 

 

 

 

Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

 

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

 

I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?

 

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

 

Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages? For some scholars, the answer to these questions has been an obvious yes. Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly.

 

Scholars on the other side of the debate don't find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don't include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn't mean that English speakers aren't paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they're not talking about them. It's possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.

 

Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it's distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.

 

Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it's impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it's impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results. So instead of arguing about what must be true or what can't be true, let's find out what is true.

 

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

 

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.

 

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?

 

The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

 

People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month"). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.4

 

Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., "That was a short talk," "The meeting didn't take long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long" Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)5

 

An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of course, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?

 

One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.6 In practical terms, it means that when you're learning a new language, you're not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking. Beyond abstract or complex domains of thought like space and time, languages also meddle in basic aspects of visual perception — our ability to distinguish colors, for example. Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colors than others, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages.

 

To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.

 

For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time.

 

Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments — and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.

 

When Russian speakers are blocked from their normal access to language by a verbal interference task, the differences between Russian and English speakers disappear.

 

Even what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders ("gender" in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, "women, fire, and dangerous things."

 

What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun's gender. For example, to say something like "my chair was old" in Russian (moy stul bil' stariy), you'd need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with "chair" (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you'd use the masculine form of "my," "was," and "old." These are the same forms you'd use in speaking of a biological male, as in "my grandfather was old." If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat'), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of "my," "was," and "old."

 

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world.7

 

In fact, you don't even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.

 

The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun. That's a lot of stuff!

 

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses.8 Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

[arkain101]

That really is an excellent article and really worth the read! Read it people!

 

 

I consider myself someone who is poorly educated in the studies of language. By that I mean, I couldn't tell you with any accuracy or consistency which words I am using is a verb, noun, lol or whatever other kinds there are (you see?). However, I recognize that one does not necessarily need to know those things specifically in order to learn and perform a language. Recently I had an inclination to start studying languages, so I found the above article really interesting.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some of my own thoughts:

In a lot of ways I can agree to some of the conclusions that were made in the article. I do a lot of thinking about space and time, objects, orientation, interaction, and relationships, reference frames, absolutes and non abolutes. This is because I study totality physics more often than any other kinds of physics. What I mean by that is, physics that deals with discovering/ understanding the full nature of the world around us, as opposed to a one way street perception.

 

In my own experience, I found that I had to break out of the boundaries of thought in order to be capable to comprehend the totality of things with more ease. These boundaries were very likely to be related to the language I learned to use, which is english. However, any language I expect provides its own world view, and what comes with it is its own world boundaries. As a person studies cosmological physics or simply analyzes the possibilities that space and time and relationships can be organized and thought of, they change their boundaries of thought most definitely.For example, if I attempt to think about time, I do not necessarily relate it to a direction. What I think about is the multi-direction possibilities. Such that, it could be back front, left right, front back, or none of those, or all of those. I believe I would most likely respond to how I considered English speakers think of time(which was probably my initial idea of how most people thought of time, prior to reading this article). That would be, things of the past are behind us, where we used to be, as if we were walking down a road and a house a few miles back would be some event in the past, while some location up in front of us, that would be the future. A horizontal one directional absolute frame. That is, the people I am most familiar with (english people) will most always consider motion and time to be related to the direction you are going, which is almost always considered forward.

 

What if you considered everything in front of you the past, and everything behind you the future? It sounds irrational, however it is just as logical of a concept. Simply imagine yourself driving / commuting your way to work entirely in reverse. Even walking around. Does this conflict with the idea that you are moving forward in time, that is, give you a sensation that you are not moving forward in time? It does give me that natural sensation, since backwards is so strongly associated with where I used to be.

 

Lets say you design a special vehicle that moves, almost no sensation of moving. It takes off very slow, and has no bumps. Lets say you get inside of it, and it is pitch black. To you it seems like you have just walked into a booth, and sat in a dark room. 20 minutes pass and suddenly a buzzer goes off and that signals you it is time to get out. First, lets say you have no idea where the vechicle was planned to go, nor do you even know if it actaully moved. So you only know for sure that you say in a black room for a time. You step outside, and find yourself in a completely different area than you were in when you got inside.

 

You have no clue where you went, what happened outside of you while you sat in the booth, but suddenly the surroundings have changed. So when you ask:

which way did I go?

was I facing backwards or forwards when I travelled?

How fast was I going?

 

You can not answer any of these questions, and yet the same result occurred even if you had got in a plan and flown. My point is that it does not really require you to use your conceptions of space and time direction/orientation, in order for your surroundings to change.

 

 

 

 

 

Back to the article.

 

This research I expect has some far reaching consequences. Since understanding other people has a lot to do with understanding how they think. And if we have evidence like this that shows how people think differently then it should enable us to understand our understandings. This is important because conflicts are so often produced by a lack of understanding in the parties involved. Not only is there a failure of communication, there is also even the issue of a naive realism, which is that each party thinks they have the true perception. And it is interesting to consider that NO language has the complete perception, or the totality perception, they are each a independent world view, and it does not always come down to language! It also has a lot to do with education and experiences.

 

In fact as far as I can see on modern philosophy and general thinking, the only way to obey "rational" thought is to acquire a bounded world view. What I mean by this is that it makes no sense to call apples oranges, oranges apples. If we want to "SPEAK" and "THINK" rationally we must then obey the language model we are using. So for english, we would say, an apple is an apple and an orange is an orange. However, as this article points out, it does not have to be organized in this fashion to become rational.

 

 

The stuff I have been posting lately about fundamental theory and time is based around these kinds of things here at its core. That is, typical rational thought (which I can only refer to english) is only but a separation model that considers itself to be capable of providing duality, such as it and me.

 

 

What I am working on in order to prove is that there is a model per say that every world view uses and thus I would expect every language uses. That is why I could see it as being something fundamental. In this, in specific areas of what we consider irrational logic, can be explained as pure whole unity.

 

For example, this would be the type of logic where, apples are oranges and people, and people are apples and oranges. It sounds irrational. Although, I expect it can be proved to show that the irrational can be rationalized, at a fundamental level.

 

You might ask... how does this work? Well, a basic explanation is that everything is considered whole and unified, however, it is only when you break things apart that rational behavior and meaning is exposed. And prior to breaking things apart, meaning and behavior resides as a body of potential.

 

So for example, lets consider an atom. We don't know what it is, we can only describe ideas about is based on our world views. The atom as a whole is irrational. It has no characteristics per say, until you decide to apply an interaction with it. We learn its behaviors be smashing it apart, and creating interactions. Or do we? The concept I am working on is that we do not learn anything about its parts, we only separate a potential of meaning, which is an entity of unity. Then, by smashing it apart, all kinds of peices appear, each with unique characteristics, that give meaning, but, prior to smashing it apart those meanings were not determinable. So for example, it would be said that there are no parts per say and even if we consider that there are each part can behave as any meaning, and it is only in the separation that those elemental meanings or possibilities become recognized as independent.

 

If you are confused by this we can apply it directly back to languages. Each language as proposed in this article has its own type of meaning and model. These languages are like the smashed apart pieces that prior to the breaking apart were entity of unity and potential of meaning. Each piece or part contains a individual properties in contrast to each other. However, we can recognize their source as unified.

[arkain101]

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg"

 

I found this quite facinating. Imagine waking up, and the first thing you are interested in figuring out is where the sun is, and which direction you are orientated (or whatever it is that they do to become aware of an unchanging direction). Then through out the entire day you are aware of which direction you face as much as you are aware of the location of your hands and legs and body. Almost like a visual point that you are always aware of, and that you constantly refer to in everything you do.

 

When we look at the remarkable navigation abilities of animals, it makes me think that they use this type of thinking as well. That is, animals in nature that are constantly navigating and moving about, may develop a kind of visual perception of direction that is felt, seen, and heard due to its incredible importance.

[sman]

I'll tell you rightaway, you've given me more reading here than I have time for, but I don't want to ignore this thread, just because I'm intimidated by all the text. I hope this doesn't seem rude.

 

Basically, the answer is "no". I'm sorry, it really is an exciting idea, but it's wrong. Words are our slaves, not our masters. We do not need words in order to have concepts. They help. They help manipulate concepts, by putting a handle on them, or packageing them into a bundle that we can move around as a unit....something like that, but we need to be able to manipulate concepts without words before we can use the words. Spacial terms, particularly, tend to vary from culture to culture, but spacial concepts do not.

 

The idea that the language we speak effects the way we think I believe falls under the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which has passionate proponents, but never accumulated any empirical support.

 

Also check out Psycholinguistics, the amazing new field of science in the business of studying human cognition through the study of language. The fact that we can learn about cognition by studying language(any language), rathur than learn about specific languages by studying the cognition of different linguistic groups supports this further. It turns out that all our thinking evolved in Africa before language came around.

 

I hope this helps. Feel free to fire back with punctuated comments/questions that I can take in smaller bites. There are also others on the forums that can address these issues more technically than I can.

[arkain101]

One of the first things worth mentioning is the expansion of the title of this topic:

The initial title was based on the article, which is more of a headline attention grabber than it is a summarized statement of the whole.

 

My preference would be to say:

 

Is there some elements in the function of language, that play a role in shaping the way we think?

 

 

 

 

I'll tell you right away, you've given me more reading here than I have time for, but I don't want to ignore this thread, just because I'm intimidated by all the text. I hope this doesn't seem rude.

 

Basically, the answer is "no". I'm sorry, it really is an exciting idea, but it's wrong. Words are our slaves, not our masters. We do not need words in order to have concepts. They help. They help manipulate concepts, by putting a handle on them, or packageing them into a bundle that we can move around as a unit....something like that, but we need to be able to manipulate concepts without words before we can use the words. Spacial terms, particularly, tend to vary from culture to culture, but spacial concepts do not.

 

The idea that the language we speak effects the way we think I believe falls under the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which has passionate proponents, but never accumulated any empirical support.

 

Also check out Psycholinguistics, the amazing new field of science in the business of studying human cognition through the study of language. The fact that we can learn about cognition by studying language(any language), rathur than learn about specific languages by studying the cognition of different linguistic groups supports this further. It turns out that all our thinking evolved in Africa before language came around.

 

I hope this helps. Feel free to fire back with punctuated comments/questions that I can take in smaller bites. There are also others on the forums that can address these issues more technically than I can.

 

Right. I see your point and it is something I put under consideration. However, I don't think the issue here is so black and white as seemingly expressed here by you. Here is why.

 

When a child is born in most circumstances the child is raised by language speaking parent(s). It seems conclusive on research and even through simple understanding that the brain begins its life akin to a mechanism able to perform a specific set of tasks. One of these tasks is to absorb information in its surroundings. During the process of development a child has no choice in what language they learn in the early stages of their life. While the language develops the strengths and weaknesses of their cognitive abilities develops along with it. For example: As expressed in the article certain languages focus on different levels of detail. In this way, conscious internal dialogue (a form of how we think) of concepts and reasoning is based on our daily practices of thought.

 

 

In my opinion this does not claim that language is the one element that strictly determines how one is able to think (as the title of this topic may wrongfully suggest). Instead, I think what is being expressed here in the article and in the above is that language variation has a very significant influence on the practices of thought an individual involves themselves with on a daily basis. Due to this, as in all applications of analytical thinking, practice creates skill, and therefore shapes an expectation of the level of skills on individual may have. Other expectations based on the validity of this hypothesis is that a pattern should be observed when specific language types of individuals are put under comparison. That is, by studying large groups of specific language types one should expect to see a pattern in the general way of thinking about things.

 

Of course there are many other elements that play a role in how one thinks as expressed in my reply to the article, however, language appears to be play one of the most initial roles of cognitive development and awareness.

 

It would not be a surprise to me to learn if all languages could be applied under one specific model. Language seems nothing more than a tool as you express:

 

We do not need words in order to have concepts. They help. They help manipulate concepts, by putting a handle on them, or packageing them into a bundle that we can move around as a unit.

 

This model would represent an organization out of disorganized information and arranging the relationships between them. In this sense, the sounds and words are not the influential part of the thinking processes but rather, it is the model that underlies language, and the extent complexity and application that is responsible for the mental skills and habbits developed for looking at the world and applying a meaning to it.

[SidewalkCynic]

I believe that our thoughts are regulated by language, and further regulated by culture, and further by sub-culture(s). I think it is extremely difficult for the individual to think "out-side of the box," if they are not actually out-side of the "box;" and a larger, or different vocabulary, is probably the metric that people inherently employ to determine a person's social position, or stereo-type profile. If people cannot understand what a person is talking about, then his individual thoughts are of no use, and probably considered psycho-something; and then, only his actions can be interpeted has detrimental to the community.

 

My example of this cultural phenomena, that I believe has an actual detrimental effect is the mathematical logic inconsistancy used to designate building floors: no floor is designated as 0, the ground floors are always the 1st floor. I thought September 11 might have corrected that, when soon there after, the area was designated "Ground Zero." Can, I prove there is an actual detrimental effect on society? No.

 

And, of course, there's the old comedy bit: why do we drive on the park way, and park in the drive way?

[Moontanman]

I'm not sure I am qualified to be in on this discussion but here is my 2 cents worth anyway.

 

I think we all perceive the universe in the same basic way, red is the some to me as it is to you, high notes are high notes, pain is pain, etc. (taking into account color blindness)

 

Language probably effects the way we communicate these things but I think a English speaker and a French speaker and Chinese speaker can all agree that a passing tractor is green no matter where we put the verbs and adverbs in association with the subject.

 

The real kicker to this would be if we ever contact alien life, another life form could indeed have different perceptions and have totally different ways to think and project ideas.

 

A good example of this is the possibility that cetaceans communicate not in words but in images. It has been proposed the reason why we have so much trouble communicating with dolphins is because they don't think in the same way as we do because when they want to communicate a ball, they actually send a sonar projected image of a ball instead of a concept of the ball.

 

I think Robert Heinlein's book "Stranger in a Strange Land" did a pretty good job of showing the possibility of a alien language and how it might be different, In the Story Valentine Michael Smith can actually do many things that look like miracles to regular humans Because he was taught an alien language from birth that had the concepts of how to do those things instead of a human language that didn't include them, he taught other humans to speak "Martian" and they too acquired the skills to do the same things.

[SidewalkCynic]

I think we all perceive the universe in the same basic way, red is the some to me as it is to you, high notes are high notes, pain is pain, etc.

Sure, those are concrete physical observations that can be made, and the language and translation of languages have much more precise definitions to work with, because of science and technological consistency. It's when we get into the abstract ideas, usually covered in philosophy and religious education, and political rhetoric, that we begin to realize the limits of language and that which is lost in language translation, or logical interpretation (reason).

[sman]

Is there some elements in the function of language, that play a role in shaping the way we think?

 

Absolutely! The problem is, once Wharfianism is watered down enough to sustain an argument, it's no longer as exciting as it was:

 

Different languages require different sentence formation and therefore tax the mind in different ways.

 

This is an effect of language on thought. I mean, I have to think about how to form a sentence in English in order to deliver my thoughts in that medium. And you must unpack them from your knowledge of English in order to receive them. In English, for example, we have to worry about tense, the time of the referent relative to the time of speaking(or writing), and this is not an obvious necessity for the conveyance of our thoughts, but it is a necessity for every English sentence. Many languages, but not English, must determine wether the referent was witnessed first hand or indirectly, as another example.

 

But all this is very boring compared to the dressed-up Wharfian statements that are used, as you observed, as headline attention grabbers.

 

 

Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

 

The answer to all of these questions is "no", and I'm sure Lera Boroditsky knows this as well as any modern linguist. All empiricle support for these have been misguided by a confusion of correlation with causation, and were undertaken in the spirit of induction, rather than deduction.

 

 

When a child is born in most circumstances the child is raised by language speaking parent(s). It seems conclusive on research and even through simple understanding that the brain begins its life akin to a mechanism able to perform a specific set of tasks. One of these tasks is to absorb information in its surroundings. During the process of development a child has no choice in what language they learn in the early stages of their life. While the language develops the strengths and weaknesses of their cognitive abilities develops along with it. For example: As expressed in the article certain languages focus on different levels of detail. In this way, conscious internal dialogue (a form of how we think) of concepts and reasoning is based on our daily practices of thought.

 

 

In my opinion this does not claim that language is the one element that strictly determines how one is able to think (as the title of this topic may wrongfully suggest). Instead, I think what is being expressed here in the article and in the above is that language variation has a very significant influence on the practices of thought an individual involves themselves with on a daily basis. Due to this, as in all applications of analytical thinking, practice creates skill, and therefore shapes an expectation of the level of skills on individual may have. Other expectations based on the validity of this hypothesis is that a pattern should be observed when specific language types of individuals are put under comparison. That is, by studying large groups of specific language types one should expect to see a pattern in the general way of thinking about things.

 

The psycholinguist Steven Pinker has cut this issue, Linguistic Determinism, precisly in his new book The Stuff of Thought. I am recommending it here, and again referring you to psycholinguistics in general as I think it's right in your zone of interest. :hyper:

 

I think Robert Heinlein's book "Stranger in a Strange Land" did a pretty good job of showing the possibility of a alien language and how it might be different, In the Story Valentine Michael Smith can actually do many things that look like miracles to regular humans Because he was taught an alien language from birth that had the concepts of how to do those things instead of a human language that didn't include them, he taught other humans to speak "Martian" and they too acquired the skills to do the same things.

 

Although arkain's argument is from grammer, and this one is from lexicon, it can still be discussed as linguistic determinism, and is the product of the same error: confusing correlation with causation.

 

The fact that Inuit lacks words like "carburator" and "clutch", and American English does not, correlates with an absence of automotive technology in Eskimo culture, and it's presence in American. It's easier to see in this example that the technology preceeds the terminology. In fact, many Eskimo's I knew in Alaska were fine mechanics (and spoke English).

If we came upon an isolated cultre somewhere and we wanted to teach them some abstruse concepts, like hypotenuse, or radar, or post-modernism, we would probably rely on English, rather than their native language, for the terminology. Therefor they would be learning some English as they leaned the new concepts. There is no need here to confuse the concepts with the words we use to handle them.

So I see Heinlein's book (which I havn't read) as about a boy who is taught alien concepts and technologies, in the aliens language, and is thereby empowered.

 

I'm reminded of Arthur C. Clarks's observation that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". Our ability to prophesize the hypotenuse of triangles would be magic to our isolated tribe.

[Moontanman]

Another example I like is the possibility that we do not recognize language in other animals because we cannot conceive of communicating in the way they do or indeed see the world the way they do. Cephalopods for instance seem to communicate with each other through color displays that are far more complex than just simple color changes. It's really difficult to explain what these color changes even look like if you have not seen them. Octopus have fantastic ability to show emotion through color changes, squids are somewhat more complex, but cuttlefish are masters of color coded communication. If you have never seen a cuttlefish display it would be a good thing for anyone interested in communication at any level to experience this. It is difficult not to imagine the complex patterns and colors do not mean something beyond simple emotions but they do indeed show emotions quite well. If we were confronted with an technological civilization that communicated through color changes could we speak to them in anything other some sort of pidgin language? Imagine intercepting a communication between two alien space craft or planets that only communicated through colors and patterns. How difficult would it be to even understand a translation key! The difference between English, Chinese and a African click language would be trivial by comparison. I see differences between humans as trivial when compared to dolphins and cuttlefish and humans......

[Moontanman]

BTW Stranger in a Strange land is a classic, everyone should read it at least once.....

[Miranda]

FYI: I addressed this topic a bit in another thread here.

The answer to all of these questions is "no", and I'm sure Lera Boroditsky knows this as well as any modern linguist. All empiricle support for these have been misguided by a confusion of correlation with causation, and were undertaken in the spirit of induction, rather than deduction.

:shrug: I agree, well put.

 

Stating that 'language effects our thoughts' is such a general statement. If it is presumed true, then it raises an interesting question: why would something as arbitrary as words and syntax have any effect on our cognition, and how do we measure such effects?

However, it cannot be words themselves that effect our cognition, because they have no inherent meaning. The difficulty in communication between speakers of dissimmilar languages is enough to show that it is not the words that effect how we think about issues, but it is ideas and concepts that are having an effect on thoughts (that is essentially what cognition is, yes?). We first grasp a concept, and then associate symbolism, not the reverse.

[SidewalkCynic]

Stating that 'language effects our thoughts' is such a general statement. If it is presumed true, then it raises an interesting question: why would something as arbitrary as words and syntax have any effect on our cognition, and how do we measure such effects?

Well, the inability to recognize a metric is because of the amount of (logical) error in the langauge, and presumably, because scientists have not been inclined to impose the invasive mind control necessary to extract subjects from a control culture and then subject the experiement group to intensive re-education of a language designed by scientists, but that which the scientists are not confined to.

 

However, it cannot be words themselves that effect our cognition, because they have no inherent meaning. The difficulty in communication between speakers of dissimmilar languages is enough to show that it is not the words that effect how we think about issues, but it is ideas and concepts that are having an effect on thoughts (that is essentially what cognition is, yes?). We first grasp a concept, and then associate symbolism, not the reverse.

I would tend to believe that iconography and all the linguistic indexes of langauge shape the cognition befor a creative concept is conceived. Kind of a "learn the basics first, then invent the wheel."

 

 

It is probably correct, that the words themselves could not have effect if they cannot be associated with anything, but the phonics, or spelling, may draw upon the data stored in the receivers' memory.

[SidewalkCynic]

BTW Stranger in a Strange land is a classic, everyone should read it at least once.....

I did about twenty years ago, but like most novels even the over-all concept, I do not harbor as a guide for my thinking - I am more of a contemporary culturalist.

[Miranda]

Well, the inability to recognize a metric is because of the amount of (logical) error in the langauge, and presumably, because scientists have not been inclined to impose the invasive mind control necessary to extract subjects from a control culture and then subject the experiement group to intensive re-education of a language designed by scientists, but that which the scientists are not confined to.

I'm not sure what you mean...

 

I would tend to believe that iconography and all the linguistic indexes of langauge shape the cognition befor a creative concept is conceived. Kind of a "learn the basics first, then invent the wheel."

So, if you are shown a foreign language in writing, it effects your cognition before you know what any of it means? If this is what you mean, then I don't see how this is the case.

[SidewalkCynic]

I'm not sure what you mean...

Well, first of all, I did not mean "invasive," I meant "intrusive."

 

Essentially, what I am getting at will probably be better recognized if we were to begin actual realization of colonizing an extra-terrestrial entity. Where as, scientist would be in intensive guardianship of the community, and that is going to get very specific as to how to prevent the chaos that we endure in our terrestrial societies - cannot take the chance of somebody sabotaging the community of such confined and sensitive surroundings.

 

But, we have to begin cultivating these societies on earth, eventually, if we are to ever begin construction of the extra-terrestrial. And the space station is hardly a community, as an example.

 

So, if you are shown a foreign language in writing, it effects your cognition before you know what any of it means? If this is what you mean, then I don't see how this is the case.

You give a good point here, but I think that no matter what the icon, or glyph arrangement may be, a person is going to assign some preconception to it based on past experiences; primarily they would recognize that it is a visual representation of a language, because of their recognition of a pattern. Certainly, the unexposed child is probably the easier to teach, but consider the complexities we have with: to, too, and two.

 

And I can only begin to imagine the acuity necessary for the recognition of distinction between the glyphs of the Oriental languages, and I think the Islamic language glyphs tend to necessitate the same visual analysis.

 

(I should probably add more, but I got to go)

Adding more content 09.06.29

 

When we see unfamiliar systems they probably appear to be either complex, or simple, our primary system appears to be moderate, because we understand it. So when encountering an unfamiliar writing system we make an assumption (cognizant choice). And then the verbal system associated with the icon is going to invoke further analysis, and we are going to call upon some mnemonic association with the primary language, and this mnemonic association is an extention of the effects on the assumptions.