Language II Flashcards
The Whorfian question
Are our own concepts of time, space, and matter given in substantially the same form by experience to all men, or are they in part conditioned by the structure of particular languages?
language and thought are innately intertwined
Whorf’s bold idea
the way we understand the world is a function of our language. Help us create structure. without language, we wouldn’t have rich thought
the particular language you have is a powerful influence about the kinds of things you can think about
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
strong interpretation (linguistic determinism) Milder interpretation (linguistic relativity)
Linguistic determinism
thoughts and behavior are determined by language
the language you speak determines the concepts and categories that you use, and as a result, shapes what you can think about.
no solid evidence that certain languages forbid a speaker from thinking about certain concepts
linguistic relativity
thoughts and behavior are influenced by language
language influences what we pay attention to, and this shapes experience, which influences how we think
Eskimo snow
eskimos have many different words for snow.
enriched vocabulary of snow does not mean they have deeper understanding of the “snow”
whorf got this wrong
Timeless Hopi
“hopi does not distinguish present, past, future with grammatical structures” - whorf
they do, they just express time in other ways
Color terms
most languages seem to take their basic color terms from a set of 11 color names
if only some are used, fall into hierarchy of 5 levels
Color hierarchy
2 color term languages the terms correspond to Black and White
in 3 color term languages they correspond to black white and red
languages with addition terms:
yellow, green, blue
brow
purple, pink, orange, gray
Does language influence perception of color?
if categorical effects are restricted to linguistic boundaries, these groups should show different responses across the two category boundaries.
If determined by universal properties of visual system, both populations should show same response patterns
Recognition Memory Task
subjects were given a specific color chip to remember. After 30 second delay, they were given two target chips (old one and new one) and had to recognize the original
berinmo speakers will do better when tested with wor-nol than nol-nol
Recognition Memory Task results
both english and berinmo speakers showed better performance when the two test colors were associated with different color words in their respective languages
berinmo do best on wor-nol
english do best on blue-green
Russian blues
russian speakers divide BLUE into two separate colors, goluboy and siniy
russian speakers do better when color recognition spans goluboy and siniy
Grammatical gender
marks gender with morphological information carried by pronouns, determiners, nouns, and adjs
Boroditsky’s experiment
do people include gender in conceptual representations of objects?
Taught Spanish and german speakers arbitrary object-name pairs, either consisten or inconsisten with grammatical gender of the object in their native language
