Language and thought Flashcards
Languages differ in innumerable ways. what are these ways?
Sound structure
Melong & rhythm (prosody)
Vocabulary
Grammar
Describe the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis
Languages vary in their semantic partitioning of the world
The structure of ones languages influences the manner in which one perceives and understands the world
Languages shape the way people think
Evaluate the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis
Sapir and whorf did not conduct systematic experimental work to test their hypothesis
After tests it was determined languages do not shape the way people think
Why should we think that language may influence thought in preverbal infants
Infants recognize their mothers tongue at birth
They can link signal to meaning
What is categorization?
Ability to group objects into classes based on shared features
Possible without language but it provides a tool to express categories and communicate about them
How do links between language and categorization develop?
On the threshold of producing language (12 months)
Looking back in developmental time (3-4 months)
Describe On the threshold of producing language (12 months)
A principled link
Sufficiently constrained to pickout linguistic signals (not tone sequences)
Sufficiently powerful to promote abstraction
Describe how Labelling fosters categorisation
infants group objects that receive the same name into one category
Describe Spatial orientation and language
Specific language use have different ways of expressing orientation and spatial categories
Describe Spatial categories and language
The way children encode spatial representation and categorise spaces seems to be molded by their native language
Describe language and number
Specific languages do not seem to have deep effects on early developing maths skills
Number systems of certain languages appear to be easier to learn than number systems of other languages (this applies to large numbers)
