language - language and thought Flashcards
lecture 5 learning objectives
-Understand the ideas underlying the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and that there are strong and weaker versions of it
-Understand the problems with the strongest version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
-Be able to describe evidence from languages that encode the world in different ways, including colour, space, number, and smell
overarching question of this lecture is- how important is the language that we speak when we study how people reason about the world
Sapir whorf hypothesis
-developed by?
-what is it
-developed by Edward Sapir(linguist1884-1939)
and Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) - a fire insurance engineer and studied American languages such as Hopi and Aztec
-a hypothesis that the structure of a language determines a native speakers perception and categorisation of experience
whorfs example of the hypothesis
-whorf - his job was to process insurance claims , and whilst he did this he developed a hypothesis that language led to some of the accidents that he saw in these claims.
eg a worker who finished a cigarette and flicked it into an ‘empty’ drum of petrol (caused an explosion) - explained this as the fact you would describe the drum of petrol as empty even when full of gas led the person to make that mistake
sapir whorf hypothesis - the 2 fundamental aspects
-linguistic determinism : assumption that the form and characteristic of our language determines the way in which we think, remember and perceive.
-linguistic relativism : as different languages map onto the world in different ways, different languages will regenerate different cognitive structures (if language determines thought then thought will be different for different speakers from different languages.
sapir whorf - alternative hypothesis
-language does not fundamentally change how we view the world
-our mental categories are not determined by natural language, but are given by the nature of the world
-language therefore does not determine our perceptions of the world, it is merely the system we used to describe it (which we can describe in diff ways due to diff languages)
Sapir Whorf hypothesis - strong to weak versions and what they propose
strong version - language determines thought
weaker version - language affects only perception
weakest version- language differences affect processing on certain tasks where linguistic encoding is important
strong version is not really taken at face value really
whorf and study of language Hopi
-the concept of time
-other studies
Whorf argued that
◦ Hopi contains no words or grammatical constructions that refer to time (no way to describe time)
◦ And therefore that Hopi speakers had “no general notion or intuition of TIME as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past”
THIS WAS BASED ON FLAW ANALYSIS (he did not speak this and came to wrong analysis)
other studies of Hopi find examples of
◦ Tense, metaphors for time, units of time (e.g., days, months), words such as “ancient” and “quick”
Then, indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke up the girl again
strong version of SW hypothesis - why not taken at face value?
if language solely determines thought
-it would suggest we don’t have conscious experience without language - but people still do have it without language
-also, when you want to express something but you cant as there’s no word for it, this would not exist if language solely determined thought
colour perception and language
Different languages have different colour terms
English
– blue, green, grey
Scottish Gaelic
◦ Gorm – blue, dark blue, blue-green, vegetation green
◦ Liath
– light blue, blue-grey, light grey
◦ Glas
– green-grey, dark grey
◦ Uaine
– bright green, lighter yellow-green
different categorisation for colours
Does this affect how we perceive colour? eg do Russian speakers pay more attention to the difference between light blue and dark blue?
focal colours
-focal colours and why their special for English people
focal colours are a ‘prototypical’ colour
eg fire engine red versus wine red (when we think red we think bright red
-sky blue versus RAF blue (we usually think sky blue when someone says blue
focal colours are special for English speakers
-if we are asked to do a task where we have to remember the colour of something we are more likely to remember it if the colours are focal colours
-why?
sapier whorf explanation - they match to our colour terms
-or is it to do with our perceptual system / brain?
focal colours - heider 1972
Dani, Papua New Guinea
research- how does this relate to the SW hypothesis
-what people did in early research was look at speakers of languages who had few colour terms to see if they had those preference for focal colours as well
Dani, Papua New Guinea
◦ “mili” – black and dark colours
◦ “mola” – white and light colours
Dani speakers
◦ Learned names for focal colours more easily
◦ Remembered focal colours more easily
◦ i.e., they performed in the same way as English speakers (American students),despite not having colour terms for all focal colours
-shows doesn’t really support sapir whorf - because this language doesn’t have basic linguistic terms that correspond to those colours but still show preference , so the language isn’t important but something intrinsic like perceptual system.
However, people have struggled to replicate this finding
more recent research on Berinmo - Roberson et al 2000
-colour diagrams
-look at diagrams of colour spectrum on the slide
-english versus berinmo spectrums show differently , the diagrams represent how the language terms map onto that colour spectrum
-berinmo has 5 colour terms (so less than english)
-roberson tried to replicate heiders findings about focal colours but could not replicate it
berinmo -roberson et al 2000 cont
-procedure
-results
Given triads of coloured chips and participants had to catgeorise them
◦ Had to choose the two most similar to each other out of three (didnt have to name them )
◦ Triads manipulated so that Roberson et al. could examine category effects
-manipulated where the counters fell on the spectrum
-the counters were all the same amount of different from one another (in terms of wavelength) so there would be no real reason to see 2 are more similar
-but are different on where they map on to the colour labels for that language
so in berinmo the 2 chips fall in the nol catgory and 1 in the wor
in english 2 fall into green and one into blue
Berinmo 2000 exp results
English speakers
◦ Showed a categorical perception effect for the blue-green boundary but not nol-wor
Berinmo speakers
◦ Showed a categorical perception effect for the nol-wor boundary but not the blue-green boundary
-shows that the language lables for that colour spectrum in that language are affecting how people perform that task
-language governs how people make that decision, consistent with the weaker version of SW hypothesis that language is important and affects how you perform certain tasks
where does this leave colour?
-colour hard to measure and study
-alot language can do to colour perception, but it wont rewire your system
-nevertheless there appears ro be some role for lingusitic factors
