Language and Thought

Question 1

Language and Thought – the context

Answer 1

• Unlike other animals, when humans think they often think in the language (or one of the languages) they speak.
• This observation raises the question of how, very generally, language and thought are related to one another.
• Last time we talked about concepts, mainly those that have a single corresponding word.
• But the question this time is a broader one – it is not just about words

Question 2

If concepts reflect categories that are objectively out there in the world, independent of the languages used to express those concepts, talk about the relationship between categorising and language.

Answer 2

Then how we categorise (“think about”, in one sense) the world shapes what language must be like if we are to talk (sensibly) about the world.

Question 3

Categories, Concepts and the World
1- if categories are socially constructed, how to cultures construct concepts and link to language
2- The idea of different cultures/different concepts is more plausible for ________?

Answer 3

1- different cultures (typically speaking different languages) may construct different concepts, and (maybe) the language we speak plays a role in shaping how we think.
2- abstract concepts, but it can be applied more widely.

Question 4

The Traditional View
1- what is the view?
2- name some people that have promoted versions of this view

Answer 4

1- the traditional view that thought has priority over language and that languages are tailored to express the thoughts we have.

2- Aristotle (ancient Greek philosopher), Jean Piaget (key figure in developmental psychology), Noam Chomsky (key figure in modern linguistics), Roger Schank (key figure in GOFAI – good old-fashioned AI – as applied to language)

Question 5

The Traditional View – why?
1- what do some adherents of the traditional view argue?
2- what does it have in common with?
3- why are natural languages the way they are?

Answer 5

1- Some adherents of the traditional view argue that there is a LANGUAGE OF THOUGHT (or “Mentalese”)
— For example, Jerry Fodor in his book “The Language of Thought” (1980)

2- It has much in common with Natural Languages

3- Natural Languages are the way they are so that we can externally express what we are thinking in Mentalese.

Question 6

What is the second view, that language determines thought?

Answer 6

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Question 7

The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis)
1- who was it anticipated by
2- what did they say
3- implication of leaning languages in different cultures

Answer 7

1- Anticipate by Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder in 18th/19th century Germany

2- “language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about”- Benjamin Lee Whorf

3- Having learnt languages in different cultures, they will be though about in different ways and thinking about the world will be different

Question 8

List some well-known claims attributed to Whorf

Answer 8

1) The Hopi don’t have a “linear” concept of time
2) The Inuit have vastly more words for types of snow than English speakers
3) Not having a word for a concept makes it hard/impossible to understand
German:
- Schadenfreude
- Anstandsstückchen (the last item on a plate of food)

Question 9

What else did Whorf do?

Answer 9

He also made observations about differences in sentence structure and claims about how they affected thought

English
It is a dripping spring

Apache
tó nö ga
water move down be clear

Question 10

What are the versions of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?
(affect of these different versions)

Answer 10

STRONG – the language someone speaks determines how they think

WEAK – the language someone speaks makes certain types of thought easy for them and other types difficult

VERY WEAK – the language someone speaks affects how easily information can be encoded and remembered

With these different versions, it becomes difficult to devise a test of the hypothesis

Question 11

Whorf’s Story

Answer 11

• Whorf was a fire prevention engineer who worked in the insurance industry, and who studied linguistics in his spare time (mainly with Sapir, an academic linguist who worked at Yale). Geoff Pullum called him a “Connecticut fire prevention inspector and weekend language-fancier” (in “The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax” – about the “snow” claim).
• He studied Amerindian languages at a time when they were falling into disuse and were in danger of disappearing
• His work on linguistic relativity became influential in Psychology in the 1950s after the posthumous publication of a set of his papers.
• Some initial results (by Lenneberg and colleagues) appeared to support Whorf
• Fairly quickly, (1960s onwards) results were found that seemed to go against his ideas, and he was criticized for being unscholarly and imprecise.
• More recently (c.2000 on) his ideas have been revisited and re-investigated.

Question 12

What are general criticisms of Whorf

Answer 12

1) He used a simplistic, word-by-word, approach to translation

2) He assumed that every aspect of language and language structure is reflected in thought

3) He ignores the fact that languages can express concepts that they do not have single words for (e.g. by using more complex expressions)
–“American Psychologist”
– Schadenfreude = “pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune”

4) He ignores the fact that language differences almost always go together with cultural differences and that cultural differences may be more important than language differences in bringing about different ways of thinking.

Question 13

Psychology against Whorf

Answer 13

• speakers of languages with very different colour vocabularies (some languages only have two words that are purely colour terms– corresponding roughly to light/warm and dark/cool) see colours in similar ways (though there has been much recent work refining this view)
  – Some of this work was by Eleanor Rosch who did anthropological work with her then husband Fritz Heider (among the Dani, in Papua New Guinea, who have just two basic colour terms: mili = light/warm and mola = dark/cold) [some published under her married name, Heider]
• This line of research led to the classic linguistic work “Basic Color Terms” by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (1960), which was seen as cementing an anti-Whorfian position
• Note that perceiving colours is a very small corner of human thinking, if it is thinking at all.

Question 14

Basic Colour Terms
1- what are these
2- different languages have ____?
3- what is the order in which terms appear in languages?
4- example
5- apply to Whorf

Answer 14

1- Terms whose primary meaning is just a colour
2- Different languages have different numbers of these terms
3- fixed
4- eg. Every language has 2 colours- black and white. If it has 3, red is added. Adding more- yellow, blue and green, adding more- brown, adding more purple, pink, orange, grey.
5- SO Whorf is wrong on that

Question 15

Recent Revival in Psychological Research on Language and Thought

Answer 15

Including work on colour as Sussex
Anna Franklin and Jenny Bosten

And a broader set of studies elsewhere
Lera Boroditsky

Question 16

More Recent Work on Colour
Roberson et al. (2000)

Answer 16

• Berinmo tribe of New Guinea vs English speakers
• The Berinmo have 5 basic colour terms.

Found:
across tasks (similarity judgements, category learning, recognition memory) categorical perception of colour was aligned with colour terms

These results suggest that perception/thought is guided by language categories

Question 17

More Recent Work on Colour
Winawer, Witthoft, Frank ,Wu, Wade, & Boroditsky ( 2007)

Answer 17

• noted that Russian has two basic colour terms for the area of colour space that is called blue in English.
• These terms are goluboy (light blue) and siniy (dark blue)
• This distinction makes it easier to for Russian speakers to discriminate two blues, if one is light and one is dark.
• But this effect is abolished if participants perform a verbal interference task at the same time!
• The verbal interference task prevents them using verbal labels for the colours.
• if you’re using the language to think about the colours you’re seeing it does have a difference on discrimination

Question 18

Describing Actions
Who dunnit? (Fausey & Boroditsky, 2010)

Answer 18

Both actions for which liquid is poured out of a container but have different properties- one is intentional and the other is accidental

Question 19

Linguistic Relativity
Who dunnit? (Fausey & Boroditsky, 2010)
Background

Answer 19

Intentional (Agentive)
English: She broke the vase.
Spanish: (Ella) rompió el florero.

Accidental (Non-Agentive)
English: The vase broke.
Spanish: Se rompió el florero.

• The Spanish (Se rompió el florero) is a reflexive construction, that might be glossed as “the vase broke itself”
• Is there a difference in how often Spanish and English speakers use these agentive (“She broke…”) vs non-agentive (“It broke”) constructions?
• Do these differences in language correspond to a difference in memory for the same event?

Question 20

Linguistic Relativity: Fausey & Boroditsky, 2010
Task

Answer 20

Task: watch videos of both kinds of events

–Study 1: “What happened?”

–Study 2: “Who did it?”

Question 21

Fausey & Boroditsky, 2010
Results for Study 1

Answer 21

Study 1: Differences in language

– For intentional events: no difference

– For accidental events: English speakers used more agentive descriptions (“She broke…”) than Spanish speakers (2 bars on right hand side)

– This finding reflects the fact that the non-agentive construction is common in Spanish for accidental events, whereas in English we tend to stick with “she broke…”, even though, in the strong sense, there is no agency (=deliberate action of breaking)

Question 22

Fausey & Boroditsky, 2010
Results for Study 2

Answer 22

Study 2: Differences in memory

The memory task does not rely on language in the same way that the description task does

– For intentional events: no difference

– For accidental events: English speakers remembered the correct actor more frequently than Spanish speakers (2 bars on right hand side)

• English speakers would typically have said “she broke…”, Spanish speakers “It broke…”

– As a control, an object orientation memory task showed no baseline language differences in memory ability

Question 23

Linguistic Relativity: Who dunnit?
Conclusion

Answer 23

Differences in language influenced the encoding/memory of the event

Question 24

Boroditsky (2001), Chen (2007), Fuhrman et al. (2011)

Answer 24

Boroditsky (2001): time metaphors in Mandarin and English
–English speakers tend to talk about time as if it were laid out along a horizontal time line, Mandarin speakers as if it were laid out vertically.
- Processing a vertical array primed time judgements in Mandarin
- Processing a horizontal array primed time judgements in English

Chen (2007)
- Disputed the linguistic analysis – Mandarin speakers also use horizontal metaphors
- Failed to replicate the empirical findings

Fuhrman et al. (2011)
- Confirmed horizontal metaphors in Mandarin
- But still found language differences – vertical time coding in Mandarin

Question 25

Other comparisons that could shed light on the relation between language and thought

Answer 25

• Language in the deaf vs language in the hearing
• Language in aphasics vs language in speakers without brain damage
• Language in humans vs “language” (or communication systems) in animals
• Language in monolinguals vs language in bilinguals and multilinguals
• Use of different dialects or different registers of the same language, either by the same speaker or by different speakers

– There has been work on language in different social classes in the UK (Basil Bernstein)
– And on black vs white dialects in the US (William Labov)

Question 26

Is there a MIDDLE WAY?

Answer 26

The Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed, based on observations of children’s development, that language and thought are initially separate (with early language being mainly vocal imitation), but that “internal speech” gradually becomes the major form of thinking.

His influence was curtailed by his early death, aged 37 (compare; Piaget, 84)

Question 27

Vygotsky’s Three Stages

Answer 27

STAGE ONE
language and thought are independent
–Speech is mainly imitative (“pre-linguistic” babbling)
–Thought is similar to thought in non-human animals

STAGE TWO
Speech is connected to behaviour via overt spoken accompaniments (“egocentric speech” – not intended for others). Words direct attention, but their connection with action is not always clear to an observer.

As this stage progresses, words begin to precede action more often

STAGE THREE
After the age of about 7 speech becomes internalized. The distinction between form and meaning and the mappings between them are mastered. Inner speech becomes the main way of thinking.

BUT – for Vygotsky Speech and Thinking are never identical

Question 28

What are the different views of language?

Answer 28

1) The traditional (and most widely accepted) view is that language has the properties it has so that it can express the kinds of thought that humans are capable of – thought shapes language.

2) An alternative view, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, is that language shapes thought

–There are stronger and weaker forms of this hypothesis

3) Vygotsky proposed a middle way, at least in development.

• Until about 2000 most psychologists thought that Whorf’s view had been refuted empirically, with particular emphasis on research on the processing of colour
• However, some recent work has revived interest in some of Whorf’s ideas.