Investigating the effects of language on thoght

Investigating the effects of language on thought

John Lucy suggests three broad areas that should be investigated:Language in GeneralLinguistic StructuresLanguage use

Areas of study:

Many researchers affirm that knowing any language will lead to particular cognitive effects since all human languages make use of conventional symbols (Peirce) and complex grammatical structures.

Language in general

The specific effects of language on thought can be studied through the use of some researches on animals. For instance: In the wild, some monkeys have the ability to interpret different alarm calls. They can also use these alarms to deceive other monkeys. But they dont show understanding of cause-and-effect relationships. In captivity, many animals have been introduced to very simple symbol systems. Even though these systems are very simple they seem to enhance the animals cognitive processes.

Animal symbolic language

Another way of investigating the influence of language-in-general on thought is studying children who have not yet learned a language.Researchers study very young prelinguistic infants or deaf children who are raised in normal circumstances but who have been deprived of early exposure to language, because their hearing parents do not use sign language.

The fact that socialization starts from day one makes impossible to study real prelinguistic infants, but some insights can be deduced from observing very young children.All human babies are born capable of recognizing and (eventually) producing all the sounds used in all human languages.This flexibility starts to be lost at around the age of 6.As adults they wont be able to hear or produce many contrasts between sounds used in other languages without long training.

Exposure to any human language begins to change childrens mental representations of the acoustic material they hear, almost since they are born.

Deaf children of hearing parents are a group of interest for researchers.Researches have demonstrated that deaf children expose to sign language are able to develop the theory of mind at the same time than hearing children.On the contrary, deaf children whose parents do not teach them sign language, delay the development of this cognitive ability. Deaf children

It is the ability to attribute mental states to other people and to interpret, explain and predict their behaviour (Leslie, 2001)

Theory of mind

This area of inquiry looks at some classic Whorfian questions which try to find out what is the influence of the particular language you speak on your vision and perception of the world.Researchers investigate the effects of specific linguistic forms in a given language on the thought processes of the speakers of that language.Researchers have usually focused their studies on the semantic domain and the grammatical categories.

Linguistic structures

These are groupings of words that have some core meaning in common. Examples of semantic domains include kinship terms, colour terms or body part words.

Semantic domains

These are the grammatical structures of a particular language that must be used in order to produce well-formed sentences in that language.Since Whorf, many scholars have focused their studies on grammatical categories because of their potential influences on thought. These categories are so important to be studied since they are habitual, obligatory and most of the time unconscious.

Grammatical categories

Some other aspects of languages that have shown some influence on thought are:ColourSpaceShape versus material composition.

This is a semantic domain which has been studied for over 50 years.Berlin and Kay have studied the colour terms in 20 different languages and have compared them to 78 other languages from the literature.They argue that their findings have demonstrated cross-cultural and cross-linguistic universals in the realm of colour.

Colour

Space constitutes another domain of human experience that has been tested for Whorfian effects. The two main aspects of space that have been profoundly studied are spatial frames of reference and spatial categories. Space

There are two frames of references in human languages, they are relative and absolute frames of reference. According to Levinson there are some languages that provide one frame of reference or the other, and some others which provide both of them.Levinson findings have helped him to affirm that the use of a relative or absolute frame of reference influences how the speakers perceive and act upon the spatial world.

Spatial frames of reference

Melissa Bowerman, Soonja Choi and colleagues have a series of experiments with Korean and English speaking infants, toddlers and adults to determine whether the existence of different ways of categorizing space linguistically affects how people perceive space.The main differences they found were in the ability to distinguish between tight and loose fit as well as between on and in. This abilities were similar in young children, but they started to disappear as they become more competent in the use of their native languages.Spatial categories

Shape and material composition also provide valuable evidence about how we perceive and categorize the world around us.John Lucy and Suzanne Gaskins investigated English and Yucatec speakers. They found out that treating nouns linguistically as uncountable masses leads speakers to focus more on the material rather than in its shape.

Shape versus material COMPOSITION

The third way in which language might influence thought is through habitual patterns of use. Our thought processes might be affected by the social patterns of everyday language use.

Language use

Lera BoroditskyLera Boroditsky is an Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UCSD and Editor in Chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology. She previously served on the faculty at MIT and at Stanford. Her research is on the relationships between mind, world, and language (or how humans get so smart).