Week 2: Language and Thought

Question 1

What is the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis?

Answer 1

Language has powerful and pervasive influences on thought; language is the driving force between reasoning capacities

Question 2

What is the Universalist perspective on langauge (Chomskian Linguistics)?

Answer 2

principles underpinning the structure of language are biologically preset in the human mind and hence genetically inherited; all humans share the same underlying linguistic structure, irrespective of sociocultural differences

Question 3

What are the two main perspectives for spatial frames of reference? (According to Li & Gleitman)

Answer 3

Dietic or egocentric descriptors such as left and right – also called body-centered, response, or relative.

Externally referenced – relative to landmarks or coordinates outside the observer; also known as allocentric, geocentric, place, cue-based or absolute.

Question 4

What are the subdivisions of allocentric references? (According to Li & Gleitman)

Answer 4

Intrinsic properties of external objects (foot of the hill, the front of the house, the nose of the plane)

Local regions (near the toolshed)

Global landmarks and regions (in Cleveland, East)

Question 5

What was the research question in the Li & Gleitman experiment?

Answer 5

Whether the authors could induce Tenejapan-like (use of absolute directions) and Dutch-like spatial reasoning (use of egocentric directions) behavior in this population by systematically varying the spatial contexts in which they are tested.

Question 6

What were the differences in the “Animals-in-a-row” Test between Li & Gleitman and Levinson & Kita’s originl study?

Answer 6

There were only 3 animals used in L&G’s study, thereby reducing cognitive load and allowing the participants to second-guess the experimenters. In the original Levinson and Kita study, the participants had to pick out 3 animals (out of 4) that were used.

Question 7

What was the conclusion for Li & Gleitman’s study?

Answer 7

Presence of landmark cues weakens the bias of subjects towards egocentric responses, as compared to the bias of subjects in the featureless conditions.

In other words, it makes people more prone to absolute responses.

This gives evidence against the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis

Question 8

What were the results of Li & Gleitman with pre-linguistic populations?

Answer 8

In unfamiliar landmark free (laboratory) and landmark-rich unfamiliar environments, it was predominantly egocentric/relative.

In familiar home environment, they became objective – absolute/place/allocentric

Question 9

What are the frames of references according to Levinson et al.?

Answer 9

Relative: Viewer centered coordinates based on body axes (left/right/back/front)

Intrinsic: Described in terms of object centered coordinates of the reference or landmark object based on intrinsic facets of the objects (in front of X)

Absolute: Described in terms of coordinates like cardinal direction, centered on the reference object.

Question 10

What are the criticisms that Levinson et al. listed for Li & Gleitman

Answer 10

1. Confounding intrinsic and absolute frames of references.
2. Allowed subjects to second guess the intentions of the experimenter in the Animals in a row task due to low cognitive load
3. The varying of environmental conditions by L&G would show nothing about language or conceptual predisposition, only about the context.

Question 11

How did Levinson et al. show that L&G confounded intrinsic and absolute frames of references?

Answer 11

In the duck pond experiment, instead of rotating 180 degrees, Levinson et al. rotated the participants only 90 degrees.
This was used to show that the ducks would only invoke an intrinsic frame of reference as opposed to an absolute one.

Question 12

What are the main conclusions of the Levinson et al. experiment?

Answer 12

No bimodal distribution as found in Li & Gleitman

Support for the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis

Question 13

What is the purpose of the paper by Winawer et al. (Russian Blues)?

Answer 13

Get objective results on how language affects color perception, as previous studies relied on memory and did not give objective views.

Question 14

What are the research questions in the paper by Winawer et al. (Russian Blues)?

Answer 14

Are there crosslinguistic differences in color discrimination even for simple, objective, perceptual discrimination tasks?
If so, do these differences depend on the online involvement of language?
Will verbal interference affect only the performance of the language group that makes this linguistic distinction?

Question 15

What were the conclusions of the paper by Winawer et al. (Russian Blues)?

Answer 15

Russian speakers showed a category advantage due to their language, but it was disrupted by the verbal intereference task.

Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors if they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian

Effects of language were most pronounced on more difficult, finer discriminations.

This article supports the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis

Question 16

What is the main of the paper by Gibson et al. (Color naming across languages)?

Answer 16

Show a reconciliation between the two main colour naming hypothesis (color-naming systems emerge from universal underlying principles determined innately and the view that culture determines color categories).
They do this through the efficient-communication hypothesis, which states that categories reflect a tradeoff between informativeness of the terms and their number
If a culture has little need for many high-consensus color categories, it is simpler in that communication system not to have them

Question 17

What does the efficient communication hypothesis say about the results by Gibson et al. (Color naming across languages)?

Answer 17

All cultures around the world favor communication about warm colors over cool colors, and that this phenomenon reflects a universal feature of natural scenes: Objects defined by human observers tend to be warm colored while backgrounds tend to be cool colored.

There is a large variance of average surprisal values across languages which suggests that the average usefulness of color varies among language groups

Question 18

What is the difference between the Tsimane and the Western Groups in the paper by Gibson et al. (Color naming across languages)?

Answer 18

Tsimane have an extensive botanical vocabulary (14), which might obviate the need for color terms in their culture

Predominance of artificially colored objects in Western cultures promotes the usefulness of color and, consequently, increases color-naming efficiency.

Question 19

Why is the relationship between vision and language is

important according to Lupyan & Ward (Language and vision supression)?

Answer 19

To show that language and vision are not independent modules (according to the modularity hypothesis, they are).

Humans live in a linguistic world, with much of human behavior guided by language; the extent to which its effects on behavior include changes to ongoing perceptual processing rather than solely to higher-level decision processes is still largely unexplored.

An improved understanding of interactions between language and perception clarifies and constrains theorizing about cases when learning and using different languages should or should not affect perceptual processing.

Question 20

What are the conclusions of the paper by Lupyan & Ward (Language and vision supression)?

Answer 20

Language-based activation of visual representations can act as a top-down “boost” to perception

Valid verbal label helped performance as opposed to a non-label baseline; objects cued by invalid labels tended to be less likely to be detected.

Facilitation due to labels occurs at a lower, perceptual level (although our results leave open the question of where precisely in the visual system this interaction occurs).

Question 21

What alternative interpretation of the results in the paper by Lupyan and Ward (Language and vision supression)?

Answer 21

Labels affect performance at a postperceptual semantic/decision level.

One possibility is that the verbal cue activates visual features typical/diagnostic of the cued category.
The combination of bottom-up and top-down information becomes sufficient to propel the sensory input into awareness. This mechanism can be thought of as a kind of category-based attention