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A Way with Words
Do languages help mold the way we think? A controversial idea from the
1930s is getting a second look.
By JR Minkel
The way you speak says a lot about you. Your dialect or accent might
indicate where you grew up, for instance, while your vocabulary may suggest
the type of education you've had. But can the language you use--English,
Spanish, Mandarin, etc.--indicate the way you think, or help shape those
thoughts?
In the 1930s, American linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf argued persuasively that
language did indeed affect thought. For instance, Eskimos, who parse "snow"
into at least seven different terms, must find our simplistic way of
talking about it unthinkable, he suggested [see "Snow by Any Other Name"].
While Whorf's views fell out of favor--especially that native language
created what amounts to a straitjacket for thought-they weren't forgotten.
Now a group of cognitive psychologists has revived the search for the
effects of language on the mind, with some provocative results.
Researchers first sought out Whorfian effects in the 1950s, looking at
color vocabularies. Some languages chop the spectrum into just two
categories of light and dark; others make finer, but not necessarily the
same, distinctions. Do these linguistic patterns mean that speakers of
separate languages perceive color in different ways? Apparently not. By the
1970s, psychologists concluded that linguistic and perceptual distinctions
were independent of one another.
The conclusion stuck. Linguists were and remain convinced by Noam Chomsky
of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who discovered that however
disparate human languages seem, all share a common, basic structure,
seemingly hardwired into the brain. They reasoned this wiring would control
the grammar of speech, but was separate from other parts of the brain, such
as those that governed perception or cognition in general--making it hard
for language to have an effect on the latter. At the same time, cognitive
psychologists began to think that words just name concepts, which come
first to the mind. "For a bunch of reasons, the Whorfian hypothesis became
more than neglected--it was sort of ridiculed," says Dedre Gentner of
Northwestern University.
Seeds of the Whorfian Revival
Then in the 1980s, some researchers started to point out problems with the
earlier work. For one, some noted that color perception is probably too
biologically ingrained to show influence from language. Further, the
results were linguistically biased, says John Lucy of the University of
Chicago, who helped usher in the Whorfian renaissance during the early
1990s. Researchers assumed that speakers of other languages describe color
the same way as English speakers just because their words matched up with
color samples, ignoring subtle linguistic differences. In doing so,
"basically you're sifting all the data according to your own
preconceptions," Lucy says. So their tests could never have found the
language effects they sought.
Looking for a better way to compare thoughts among language groups, Lucy
studied the small group of Yucatec Mayans living in Mexico. English
speakers tend to consider the shape or unit of a noun when talking. Living
things or objects with a well-defined shape have their unit built into the
word. We may talk about multiple "chairs," because they all come in
chair-shaped units. But sugar is "sugar," whether it's one lump or two.
Mayan speakers, on the other hand, do not refer to objects in plural form,
so shape and unit are less ingrained into their speech. Accordingly, their
language revolves more around what objects are made of than English; a
"candle" to English speakers is a "long, thin wax" to Mayans.
To see if the thought and speech patterns of the two groups coincided, Lucy
presented individuals with an object such as a comb or box. He asked study
subjects to decide which of two other objects was more similar--one with
the same shape but made of a different material or vice versa. The groups'
preferences split along linguistic lines. English speakers fancied shape;
Mayans liked material. Lucy and a coworker then found that Mayan children
shared the English predilection for shape until age seven or so, but turned
toward material by age nine. This cognitive difference appeared after the
children had acquired language, suggesting that their thought patterns
diverged as they acclimated to their way of speaking.
Studies of Bilinguals
Studying individuals who speak only one language can still leave research
open to criticism, says Lera Boroditsky of MIT, a Whorf sympathizer. To
give two different-language groups the same test, you have to translate it.
"But once you've translated the test, you no longer know if you've got the
same test," Boroditsky explains. So she has focused on bilinguals. One
study involved native German and Spanish speakers who also spoke English.
Boroditsky and a colleague asked the study subjects to describe, in
English, objects that were grammatically masculine or feminine in their
native tongues. "Key," for instance, is masculine in German and feminine in
Spanish. The native German speakers called keys "hard," "heavy," "jagged,"
etc., whereas the Spanish used words such as "lovely," "shiny" and "tiny."
Native English speakers showed similar patterns after they learned the
grammar system of a made-up language. In other words, just a brief change
in the way people talk can create a measurable effect, Boroditsky says.
She next examined how English speakers compared with Mandarin-English
bilinguals in thinking about time. English speakers tend to talk about time
in terms of horizontal dimensions: for example, the meeting was moved
"forward" or "back." In Mandarin, however, next month is "down" the
calendar and last month is "up." As you might expect would be the case if
the two groups think about time differently, the bilinguals figured out if
one event preceded another faster after concentrating on a vertical
stimulus, and the English-only group benefited from horizontal cues.
Moreover, those in the Mandarin group who learned English later in life
tended to have a stronger vertical bias. Indicating that it wasn't
necessarily the Mandarin convention of writing vertically that caused the
effect, English speakers trained briefly to talk about time using vertical
metaphors showed more Mandarin-like results on the same tests. "That's a
really powerful effect of language on thought," Boroditsky concludes, and
one that shows how flexible our minds are.
Maybe language itself gives us some of this flexibility, says Gentner,
particularly when it comes to grasping relationships. She and a colleague
tested three- to four-year-old kids with a hide-and-seek game that used two
matching three-tiered shelves. On each tier was an identical plastic pig,
and one of the pigs had a toy hidden inside. The child got to see where the
winning pig was in one shelf. Then, to find the toy, he or she had to
choose the pig in the same relative position in the other shelf--a
challenging analogy for a child that age, Gentner notes. The kids often
lost track of the winning position and searched randomly. When the test
administrator started the game by naming the three locations--top, middle
and bottom--the kids chose the correct location far more often, so the
spatial terms helped them remember. For difficult problems, then, the
proper use of language can invite us to think in a more productive way,
Gentner says.
Unusual Grammar
What about children who never learn a language? Susan Goldin-Meadow of the
University of Chicago has studied deaf children who haven't yet learned
sign language and who are brought up in English- or Mandarin-speaking
environments. The children develop their own system of gestures with a
grammar that is much different from their parents' language as well as from
most other languages in the world. Surprisingly, when adults are talking,
their gestures don't take on this rare pattern. But when forced not to talk
and to communicate with their hands alone, the adults gesture just like the
kids. So it seems that simply speaking a language like English hasn't
prevented adults from thinking the way children do. Still, learning to do
so could, in Whorfian fashion, make it harder for grown-ups to think that
way, Goldin-Meadow notes.
Not everyone buys into the inferred direction of cause and effect in some
of these studies. Lila Gleitman, for one, of the University of
Pennsylvania, has argued strongly against the Whorfian revival. She and
coworkers have found that speakers of languages with different ways of
expressing orientation in space, as well as how people and objects move,
seem to think alike if given the chance or the right cue. Language may have
trivial effects on memory akin to speaking a phone number aloud as you go
from Yellow Pages to phone, Gleitman adds. But the curious relationships
between speaking and thinking exist, she says, because we devise language
to express the thoughts we have about our culture, geography and so on.
"People develop language that's useful given those circumstances. That's
why you always find a tight relationship between language and thought."
Ultimately, there are so many ways of thinking about things, says Gentner,
that language surely won't be found to influence all aspects of cognition.
That doesn't bother her at all. "I'm just glad it's become an important
topic again because I think it people gave up on it way too early."
SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, APRIL 2002
http://www.scientificamerican.com/explorations/2002/032502language
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