L,T&C - Our View Of The World Flashcards
Why did he study Native American cultures
Whorf studied Native American cultures to investigate whether language influences the way people think.
What did he discover about Native Americans: The Hopi
The Hopi language doesn’t distinguish between past, present and future.
Therefore this influences the way they think about time.
Evaluate the Hopi (limited sample)
A weakness is that only one individual was studied.
Others have argued that the way the Hopi language describes the passing of time is not very different from European language.
This suggests that Whorf’s conclusions lacked a firm basis in fact.
How does Language affect recall of events
Carmichael et al. gave two groups of participants the same pictures but each group heard different descriptions.
When they were asked to draw them, the pictures drawn reflected the labels they had heard.
This suggests that language influences memory.
Evaluate the effect of language (Ambiguous materials)
A weakness is that the materials used were ambiguous.
In everyday life we would be less influenced by labels.
So we may not be able to generalise the results to everyday life.
Describe the Native American study (The Zuni)
Brown and Lenneberg found that the Zuni people have only one word for shades of yellow and orange and had difficulty recognising and recalling these colours compared to English speakers.
This suggests that their lack of words for those two colours affected their ability to distinguish between them.
Evaluate the Zuni study (Cross culture understanding)
A weakness with research on different cultures is that there are issues with the interpretation of participants’ responses.
The language barrier could have affected how well the Zuni people communicated their understanding of colour to the researchers.
This causes the research to lack validity.
Explain the study on how language affects recall of colour
Roberson et al. found that the Berinmo people of New Guinea had difficulty recalling and distinguishing between a variety of colours as they only have five words for different colours in their own language.
This is evidence for the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis as it suggested that specific cognitive processes are influenced by language.
Evaluate the language colour study (results)
A weakness is that some researchers have found the opposite.
The Dani people have only two words for colour but were still as good as English-speaking participants on a colour-matching task (Heider and Olivier).
This suggests that their lack of colour words did not influence their ability to think about colour.
