Language and Thought

1. Language and Thought Lauren Schmidt 5/18/06

2. The Whorfian question

3. The Whorfian question Whorf (1956): “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?”

4. Does language affect thought?

5. Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think so: ?

6. Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think so: CHANGING LANGUAGE, “POLITICAL CORRECTNESS”: chairman  chair or chairperson Indian  Native American handicapped  disabled or differently abled POLITICAL SPEECH: “mistakes were made” = “we were not responsible” ?

7. Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think so: WEBSITES WITH “COMMON SENSE” ADVICE: “Deliberately speak positively. Remove negative thinking from your life by changing your interpretation of events. Rather than immediately focusing on what could or did go wrong, stop and consider possible positive outcomes.... This positive outlook forces you to think successfully....” (Romanus Wolter, Entrepreneur.com)

8. Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think so: FICTION --- NEWSPEAK: secret police  "Ministry of Love" Ministry of War  "Ministry of Peace" “free” (only used in statements like "This dog is free from lice.") "Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now.” (Orwell, 1984)

9. Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think so: THE MAN HIMSELF (Whorf, 1956): “We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native language. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscope flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems of our minds.”

10. Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think not:

11. Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think not: Chomsky (1984): “The claim that we’re making about primitive notions is that if data were presented in such a way that these primitives couldn’t be applied to it directly, prelinguistically, before you have a grammar, then language couldn’t be learnt… We have to assume that there are some prelinguistic notions that can pick out pieces of the world, say elements of this meaning and this sound.”

12. Does language affect thought? Some people seem to think not: “There is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically affect their speakers’ way of thinking.... The idea that language shapes thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a temptation to equate it with language....” - Steven Pinker (1994) “Does language have a dramatic effect on thought in some other way than through communication? Probably not.” - Bloom & Keil (2001) “I hate [linguistic] relativism more than I hate anything else, excepting, perhaps, fiberglass powerboats.” - Jerry Fodor (1985)

13. Why are people so vehement? • Languages vary quite a lot – do our minds vary a lot, too? Intriguing and maybe scary • Theories at stake • Modularity • Domain-specificity • Can learning (the right) language help you think better? Can failing to learn it hinder thought? • Education – language as a tool • Scary ethnocentrism – judging some languages inferior

14. Does language affect thought? ...What does this question actually mean?

15. Let’s clarify the question further... ...how might language affect thought?

16. How might language affect thought? • What aspects of cognition does it affect? • perception? • memory? • representation? • reasoning?

17. How might language affect thought? • What aspects of cognition does it affect? • What kinds of cognitive performance does it affect? • performance on tasks involving language? • performance on non-linguistic tasks?

18. How might language affect thought? • What aspects of cognition does it affect? • What kinds of cognitive performance does it affect? • What aspects of language might affect thought? • phonology? • vocabulary? • morphosyntax? • metaphorical speech?

19. How might language affect thought? • What aspects of cognition does it affect? • What kinds of cognitive performance does it affect? • What aspects of language might affect thought? • By what process does language affect thought? • causing us to organize our thoughts in certain ways in order to talk about them? • focusing our attention on certain aspects of or patterns in the world? • causing us to habitually practice certain ways of thinking? • influencing how we chunk things or describe things in memory? • altering our low-level perception through top-down influence? • suggesting new ideas or categories to us? • giving us ways to understand and reason about abstract/hard to perceive domains? • affect our cognition in other unexpected ways?

20. How might language affect thought? • What aspects of cognition does it affect? • What kinds of cognitive performance does it affect? • What aspects of language might affect thought? • By what process does language affect thought? ... Let us pursue some answers!

21. Prologue: the state of the debate pre-1991(ish)

22. The state of the debate in the early 1990s Color perception had been an area of cross-linguistic difference where people initially thought there was evidence for Whorfian effects...

23. The state of the debate in the early 1990s Brown & Lennenberg (1954): codability of English color terms for a particular color is correlated with their recognition memory

24. The state of the debate in the early 1990s So maybe language affects color perception and/or memory, even on tasks where no language is involved?

25. The state of the debate in the early 1990s But other evidence made this seem an incorrect analysis... Perhaps the causal path went the other way?

26. Universal evolution of color terms • Focal colors (“best examples”) consistent across different speakers • Speakers of all languages picked out the same kinds of groups of colors, based on the natural world • Light vs. dark • 4 primary color foci: red, green, yellow, blue Berlin & Kay (1969)

27. Universal evolution of color terms Berlin & Kay (1969)

28. Some color concepts never appear X X BLELLOW

29. Universal color cognition? Similarity ratings across colors didn’t seem to vary for speakers of different languages. Color perception seemed determined by biology, not language. Heider [Rosch] (1972)

30. The state of the debate in the early 1990s Whorf and his ideas fell into disrepute and ridicule.

31. The state of the debate in the early 1990s But... Was color perception the most reasonable domain to look for an effect?

32. The state of the debate in the early 1990s “thinking for speaking”: “The activity of thinking takes on a particular quality when it is employed in the activity of speaking.... A particular utterance is never a direct reflection of “objective” or perceived reality or of an inevitable and universal mental representation of a situation.... “Thinking for speaking” involves picking those characteristics that (a) fit some conceptualization of the event, and (b) are readily encodable in the language.” Slobin (1987)

33. The state of the debate in the early 1990s “thinking for speaking”: “the dog ran into the house.” (manner encoded in verb; common in English) “the dog entered the house by running.” (manner encoded in optional adjunct; French construction) Slobin (1996)

34. The state of the debate in the early 1990s “thinking for speaking”: • Speakers of different languages tend to use many more manner words in their description of an identical scene if their language encodes it in the verb (like English) than in an optional adjunct (like French) • English speakers can list far more manner verbs in a short time than French speakers (better lexical access) • Speakers of manner-obligatory languages more readily attend to fine-grained manner distinctions Slobin (2003)

35. The state of the debate in the early 1990s Maybe the case against Whorf was not so solid on all fronts? At the same time, interesting work was going on in elsewhere...

36. The state of the debate in the early 1990s E.g., Choi and Bowerman (1991) Spatial preposition systems vary widely in how languages divide up the continuous space Apparent correspondence between preposition systems and spatial reasoning (e.g., similarity and categorization)

37. The state of the debate in the early 1990s E.g., Choi and Bowerman (1991) Maybe language can help create specific categories in domains that we all perceive and think about, but which don’t have any obvious universal and intrinsic boundaries dividing them?

38. The state of the debate in the early 1990s And elsewhere, people were examining what happens when one language completely lacks a way of talking about things that other languages have...

39. Part I: Benjamin Lee Whorf and the Case of the Spatial Reference Terms

40. Frames of Reference(how one talks about the directions and locations of objects in space…) Figure Reference Object • “Where is the girl?” • Need a Ground/Reference Object • And a relation between Figure and Ground/Reference Object (e.g., a coordinate system = Frame of Reference).

41. Frames of Reference(how one talks about the directions and locations of objects in space…) Figure Reference Object • “Where is the girl?” • The girl is to the south of the umbrella. (GEOCENTRIC FRAME OF REFERENCE) • The girl is to the left of the umbrella. (EGOCENTRIC FRAME OF REFERENCE) • The girl is at the umbrella’s front/downward side. (INTRINSIC FRAME OF REFERENCE)

42. Crosslinguistic Variations (Brown & Levinson, 1993; Pederson et al., 1998; Majid et al., 2004, etc.) • English • Egocentric preference • “left” and “right” • Tzeltal Mayan (spoken in Tenejapa, Mexico) • Geocentric preference • alan “downhill” (N), aj’kol “uphill” (S), jejch “crosshill” (EW) • Lexical Gap: No projective left or right! uphill downhill crosshill

43. How do Tzeltal speakers tend to talk about space? Frequently make statements that are the spatial equivalent of, “hand me the spoon that is to the northeast of the cup.” (sounds a bit odd in English, doesn’t it? ... could you even follow that instruction?)

44. Claims about aspects of thought affected by linguistic frames of reference • Gestural depiction of events during story-telling (e.g., Haviland, 1993) • Memory for real-life events (Levinson, 1997) • Dead-reckoning and navigational abilities (Levinson, 1996)

45. Tenejapans show an interesting tendency to confuse left-right inversions or mirror-images (i.e., reflections across the apparent vertical axis), even when visually presented simultaneously, which seems related to their absence of ‘left’ and ‘right’ terms, and the absence of related asymmetries in their material culture. (Levinson, 1996 in Gumperz & Levinson: 182)

46. I am here Tenejapans maintain a constant sense of absolute orientation, presumably by running a continuous background computation of egocentric heading with respect to abstract bearings, integrating multiple internal and external cues to achieve this. Levinson, Kita, Haun, & Rasch (2002) p. 173

47. Li and Gleitman: this can’t be! • Rats and pre-linguistic children both show signs of using both egocentric and geocentric reasoning, so it can’t be a matter of language teaching these reasoning skills • English speaking adults use geocentric terms all the time (e.g., uptown/downtown), so if language does have an effect, it should have an effect on them, too! • (But anyway, concepts are innate and language is modular, so language can’t have an effect.)

48. Rotation Experiment (right side, north side) Subject Table 2 Table 1 Table 2 Table 1 (north side) (north side) (right side) (right side) Table 2 Table 1 Table 2 Table 1 Experimental Paradigm – ANIMALS-IN-A-ROW Task (Bird’s Eye View) Step 1: Ss memorize items Step 2: Ss rotated Step 3: Ss recreate “same” as Table 1. At least 2 possible solutions. Step 3 geocentric tendency Step 3 egocentric tendency

49. Brown & Levinson (1993) 100 Dutch N = 38 90 Tenejapans N = 27 80 70 60 % of Subjects 50 40 30 20 10 0 0 1 2 3 4 5 Number of Geocentric Trials * Also reported in Pederson, Danziger, Wilkes, Levinson, Kita, Senft (1998).

50. (Alleged) confounding factors S(Uphill) House N(Downhill) 1 2 (Tenejapan table setup Outdoor, porch next to house) Testing Location Tenejapans tested outdoors on their hill and Dutchmen tested indoors in laboratory. Shouldn’t spatial performance be influenced by spatial environment?