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Stephanie Hegarty

ScienceDirect.com - Cognitive Psychology - Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and E... - 2 views

www.sciencedirect.com/...S0010028501907480

thought english language

shared by Stephanie Hegarty on 18 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Stephanie Hegarty on 18 Feb 13
     
    "Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world? This question is taken up in three experiments. English and Mandarin talk about time differently-English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical. This difference between the two languages is reflected in the way their speakers think about time. In one study, Mandarin speakers tended to think about time vertically even when they were thinking for English (Mandarin speakers were faster to confirm that March comes earlier than April if they had just seen a vertical array of objects than if they had just seen a horizontal array, and the reverse was true for English speakers)."
James Granderson

Linguistic relativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Linguistic_relativity

relativity sapir whorf linguistic determinism

shared by James Granderson on 19 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • The principle of linguistic relativity holds that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers conceptualize their world, i.e. their world view, or otherwise influences their cognitive processes. Popularly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism, the principle is often defined as having two versions: (i) the strong version that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories and (ii) the weak version that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and certain kinds of non-linguistic behaviour. The term "Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis" is a misnomer, as Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored anything, and never stated their ideas in terms of a hypothesis. The distinction between a weak and a strong version of the hypothesis is also a later invention, as Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although often in their writings their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.
  • Sapir in particular wrote more often against than in favor of anything like linguistic determinism. Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be seen as the primary proponent as a result of his published observations of how he perceived linguistic differences to have consequences in human cognition and behavior. Harry Hoijer, one of Sapir's students, introduced the term "Sapir–Whorf hypothesis",[2] even though the two scholars never actually advanced any such hypothesis.[3] Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity was reformulated as a testable hypothesis by Roger Brown and Eric Lenneberg who conducted experiments designed to find out whether color perception varies between speakers of languages that classified colors differently. As the study of the universal nature of human language and cognition came into focus in the 1960s the idea of linguistic relativity fell out of favour among linguists. A 1969 study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay demonstrated the existence of universal semantic constraints in the field of color terminology which was widely seen to discredit the existence of linguistic relativity in this domain, although this conclusion has been disputed by relativist researchers.
  • A main point of debate in the discussion of linguistic relativity is the correlation between language and thought. The strongest form of correlation is linguistic determinism, which would hold that language entirely determines the range of possible cognitive processes of an individual. This view has sometimes been attributed to Benjamin Lee Whorf, and to Ludwig Wittgenstein, but it is not currently the consensus that either of these thinkers actually espoused determinist views of the relation between language and thought.
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  • While undertaking geographical research in northern Canada he became fascinated with the Inuit people and decided to become an ethnographer. In contrast to von Humboldt, Boas always stressed the equal worth of all cultures and languages, and argued that there was no such thing as primitive languages, but that all languages were capable of expressing the same content albeit by widely differing means. Boas saw language as an inseparable part of culture and he was among the first to require of ethnographers to learn the native language of the culture being studied, and to document verbal culture such as myths and legends in the original language.
  • Boas' student Edward Sapir reached back to the Humboldtian idea that languages contained the key to understanding the differing world views of peoples. In his writings he espoused the viewpoint that because of the staggering differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were ever similar enough to allow for perfect translation between them.
  • The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
  • On the other hand, Sapir explicitly rejected strong linguistic determinism by stating, "It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on pattern expressed in language."
  • Sapir was explicit that the connections between language and culture were neither thoroughgoing nor particularly deep, if they existed at all: It is easy to show that language and culture are not intrinsically associated. Totally unrelated languages share in one culture; closely related languages—even a single language—belong to distinct culture spheres. There are many excellent examples in Aboriginal America. The Athabaskan languages form as clearly unified, as structurally specialized, a group as any that I know of. The speakers of these languages belong to four distinct culture areas... The cultural adaptability of the Athabaskan-speaking peoples is in the strangest contrast to the inaccessibility to foreign influences of the languages themselves.
  • Among Whorf's best-known examples of linguistic relativity are instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages). One of Whorf's examples of this phenomenon was the supposedly large number of words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, an example which some have later contested as a misrepresentation.[25] Another of Whorf's examples are the Hopi language words for water, one indicating drinking water in a container and another indicating a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts like snow or water, is not always possible.
  • Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.[27] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, the Hopi language does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years," but rather as a single process and that consequentially it does not have nouns referring to units of time as SAE speakers understand them. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental in all aspects of Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns. However, later Malotki (1983), who researched Hopi, claimed that he found no evidence of Whorf's claims in 1980's era speakers, nor in historical documents going back to the preconquest era.
  • Current researchers such as Lera Boroditsky, John A. Lucy and Stephen C. Levinson believe that language influences thought, but in more limited ways than the broadest early claims.
  • James Granderson on 19 Feb 13
     
    Wikipedia article about linguistic relativity. 
Brendan Raleigh

Support for Linguistic Relativity - 1 views

www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/...cats-dogs-in-press.pdf

linguistic relativism sapir whorf hypothesis cognition thinking brain thought process

shared by Brendan Raleigh on 20 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Brendan Raleigh on 20 Feb 13
     
    Gilbert, Regier, Kay, and Ivry use several studies done regarding the left and right hemisphere of the brain and how each hempishere is able to react to certain stimuli, especially color and animals, given the types of classification each language puts the items in. Due to the effect classification had on reaction times, the data supports the idea that language affects cognition and understanding of the word. "in an early study, Kay and Kempton (1984) found that English speakers perceive colors that cross the lexical boundary between ''green'' and ''blue'' to be less similar than do Tarahumara speakers of Mexico, who use the same word to identify both of these colors, and thus lack a lexical boundary at this position in color space" "Reaction times (RTs) were faster when the target belonged to a different lexical category than the distractors (e.g., blue among greens) compared to when the target and distractors were from the same lexical category (e.g., two different hues of green). However, this effect was only observed when the target appeared in the right visual field; RTs to targets in the left visual field did not vary as a function of the categorical relationship between the target and distractors." "RTs to targets in the left visual field did not vary as a function of the categorical relationship between the target and distractors" "The results of Experiment 2 are consistent with the hypothesis that language modulates perceptual discrimination by means of lexical categories more in the RVF than in the LVF. This pattern is disrupted by verbal, but not by nonverbal, interference, supporting the third prediction outlined in the introduction." "the disruption of Whorf effects by verbal interference strongly suggests that language affects discrimination on-line through the activation of lexical codes, rather than through a long-term, enduring warping of perceptual space."
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