Jimmy Nothing never went 2 school
In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis claims that language affects thought.
The hypothesis postulates that language influences the habitual thought of its speakers: that different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of any language condition the thoughts of its speaker community.
{ Sapir–Whorf hypothesis | Wikipedia }
Faced with pictures of odd clay creatures sporting prominent heads and pointy limbs, students at Carnegie Mellon were asked to identify which “aliens” were friendly and which were not.
The students were not told that the aliens fell naturally into two groups, although the differences were subtle and not easy to describe.
Some had somewhat lumpy, misshapen heads. Others had smoother domes. After students assigned each alien to a category, they were told whether they had guessed right or wrong, learning as they went that smooth heads were friendly and lumpy heads were not.
The experimenter, Dr. Gary Lupyan, added a little item of information to one test group. He told the group that previous subjects had found it helpful to label the aliens, calling the friendly ones “leebish” and the unfriendly ones “grecious,” or vice versa.
When the participants found out whether their choice was right or wrong, they were also shown the appropriate label. All the participants eventually learned the difference between the aliens, but the group using labels learned much faster. Naming, Dr. Lupyan concluded, helps to create mental categories.
The finding may not seem surprising, but it is fodder for one side in a traditional debate about language and perception, including the thinking that creates and names groups.
In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?
The latest research changes the framework, perhaps the language of the debate, suggesting that language clearly affects some thinking as a special device added to an ancient mental skill set. Just as adding features to a cellphone or camera can backfire, language is not always helpful. For the most part, it enhances thinking. (…)
Language also has a significant role in seeing and remembering where objects are in space. Dr. Dedre Gentner at Northwestern and her colleagues conducted experiments on the spatial reasoning of hearing children and children who “home-sign.”
Home-signers have hearing parents, but they are congenitally deaf and have never been taught a sign language. The gestural language they develop is invented solely by themselves. (…)
The children were shown two side-by-side boxes. Internally, each box was divided in three. In each space was a card.
During each trial, the experimenter took a card from the first box and showed the child that it had a special star on the back. Replacing it in the first box in the same space, the experimenter asked the child to find where the special card would be in the second box. Essentially, the children were asked to map the position of the target card in the first box to the same position in the second.
The researchers found that children without words for spatial relationships, whether young or home-signers, had much more trouble finding the special card in the second box than older hearing children who had learned the relevant words.
For young hearing children, exposure to spatial language in the experiment strongly influenced the success rate. If the experimenter used spatial terms when speaking to a child, saying, “I’m putting the card in the top” (or “middle” or “bottom”), as opposed to, “I’m putting the card here,” the children were much likelier to find the correct spot in the second box.
The effect lasted not just through the experiment, but until at least two days later, when the children were retested.
“By giving us a framework for marshaling our thoughts, language does a lot for us,” Professor Gentner said. “Because spatial language gives us symbols for spatial patterns, it helps us carve up the world in specific ways.”
photo { Rominita }
April 24th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
In college, my Russian language professor explained that there is no exact crossover translation of, for example, “I have a chair” from English to Russian. The reason is because nowhere in the Russian language does there exist a meaning for possession. It is more like “The chair is next to me” but is used in the sense that the chair next to the person is habitually used by the person. Now think of Communism. Now think of Capitalism.
Now, I’m not saying that I have this exactly right, but that is the idea I got from it. Correct me if I’m wrong.