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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Maeve Couzens

Maeve Couzens

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and... - 0 views

  • The idea that language shapes the way we think, often associated with Benjamin Whorf, has long been decried as not only wrong but also fundamentally wrong-headed.
  • which language influences nonlinguistic cognition, particularly in the domain of time
  • [T]he famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, that differences among languages cause differences in the thoughts of their speakers […] is wrong, all wrong. (p. 57)
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  • The idea that thought is the same as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity[
  • The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works, or even how to study it. Now that scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate[thinking]with language. (pp. 58–59, italics added)
  • Experimental work since Whorf's time has suffered several additional problems. Pinker noted that some apparent behavioral differences between language groups have turned out to be artifacts of clumsy translation.
  • Chinese speakers are less capable of reasoning counterfactually than English speakers because Chinese lacks subjunctives, which serve as counterfactual markers in English
  • The Orwellian idea that people think (mostly or entirely) in the medium of natural language, and therefore that language can be equated with thought, is unsupported empirically and is also problematic in principle, given what is known about language and about thought
  • Languages differ in the extent to which they describe duration in terms of distance as opposed to amount of substance.
  • Is this conflation of distance and duration universal to humans, or does it depend in part on the conflation of distance and duration in language?
  • Why should we continue to do Whorfian research? One possible reason is that cataloging crosslinguistic cognitive differences could be a step toward charting the boundaries of human biological and cultural diversity
  • crosslinguistic cognitive differences could be tools for investigating how thinking works and, in particular, for investigating the role of experience in the acquisition and representation of knowledge: If people who talk differently form correspondingly different mental representations as a consequence, then mental representations must depend, in part, on these aspects of linguistic experience. If discovering the origin and structure of our mental representations is the goal, then crosslinguistic cognitive differences can be informative even if they are subtle and even if their effects are largely unconscious. Whether or not they correspond to radical differences in speakers' conscious experiences of the world, Whorfian effects can have profound implications for the study of mental representation.
Maeve Couzens

ScienceDirect.com - Cognition - Learning to express motion events in English and Korean... - 0 views

  • English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motion events
  • English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motion events
  • English characteristically conflates Motion with Manner, Cause, or Deixis, and expresses Path separately
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  • Korean, in contrast, conflates Motion with Path and elements of Figure and Ground in transitive clauses for caused Motion, but conflates motion with Deixis and spells out Path and Manner separately in intransitive clauses for spontaneous motion.
  • sensitivity to language-specific patterns in the way they talk about motion from as early as 17–20 months.
  • learners of English quickly generalize their earliest spatial words — Path particles like up, down, and in — to both spontaneous and caused changes of location and, for up and down, to posture changes, while learners of Korean keep words for spontaneous and caused motion strictly separate and use different words for vertical changes of location and posture changes.
  • suggest that they are influenced by the semantic organization of their language virtually from the beginning.
Maeve Couzens

ScienceDirect.com - Cognitive Psychology - Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and E... - 0 views

  • Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world?
  • 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
  • Another study showed that the extent to which Mandarin–English bilinguals think about time vertically is related to how old they were when they first began to learn English.
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  • In another experiment native English speakers were taught to talk about time using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin.
  • language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains and
  • one's native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time) but does not entirely determine one's thinking in the strong Whorfian sense.
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