How language shapes thought

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-language-shapes-thought&print=true

by philh • 15 years ago

63 42 15 years ago

keeptrying2• 15 years ago

Link to the full article in PDF which is also NOT under a pay wall.

http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf

I think anyone who knows more than one language implicitly realizes the conclusions of this paper but she has some fascinating examples.

philh• 15 years ago

Apologies. I didn't realise there was a paywall; I'm not sure why it works for me.

Can a mod edit the link?

jsnell2• 15 years ago

That's a strong claim. It's possible that bilingual people behave differently when using different languages as the article claims (I have my doubts), but even so they might not be aware of it on any level. At least I don't think my world view is affected in any way regardless of which language I'm using of the 4 I know.

keeptrying2• 15 years ago

Are the four languages you know from the same root language or from similar cultures?

Let's take Hindi and English.let's say I'm talking to "Fred" who is 15 years older than me.

In english I would say " Fred how are you doing?"

The Hindi version would be "uncle friend how are you? (using the respectful forms of the word "you"). And because I'm using the respectful form, I would genuinely feel more respectful of all my elders.

andreaja• 15 years ago

Bilingual here (so this is anecdotal). When I'm immersed in the different lingual environments I notice fairly substantive differences in my identity. It's not stuff that's necessarily very apparent to bystanders (as far as I can tell).

The differences aren't necessarily as sweeping as 'world view'. I don't change political preferences by changing language.

miespanolesmalo• 15 years ago

To eradicate bad thoughts and erase memories is the reason I started learning Spanish: http://dreaminespanol.com/spanish-lifehacks/eradicate-bad-me...

Okay, that and a hot Spanish woman I was interested in. Both were good motivations to take on a new language.

rhizome4• 15 years ago

Paywalled. Suffice it to say that the first paragraph doesn't mention Sapir-Whorf at all.

davnola• 15 years ago

The 3rd paragraph does http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf

rhizome4• 15 years ago

The 3rd paragraph is behind the paywall.

Tharkun• 15 years ago

Linguistic Relativity.

rhizome4• 15 years ago

Also behind the paywall.

hardy263• 15 years ago

If it's daytime and we're outside, I can point north by pointing perpendicular from where the sun is heading. If it's nighttime and we're outside, I can point north by finding polaris.

Asking me to point north inside a building with my eyes closed is a different story.

Meai• 15 years ago

That is a very superficial conclusion, and I'm eager to expand on it. The environment was there first, not language. Sure, language is not as fast changing as the environment, so there is some delay which people apparently interpret as "language makes you think in non-obvious ways", but the reality is, that language is pretty much exactly as efficient as it can be and it is constantly adapting to be an optimal fit for the surroundings.

Example: When I say: "You are a police man", then one might say that I'm technically wrong. There is nothing about you that makes you intrinsically a "police" man. You might say that your job doesn't define you. But here is the thing: What you do, actually defines you very well in our society. It is very efficient to say: "you are a loser", instead of saying the 'fairer' version: "you are behaving like a loser" because in all likelihood, his behaviour will not change, and if it ever does, you can change if you ever see him again.

gruseom• 15 years ago

A good article filled with concrete examples. Anyone interested in how language conditions thought should read it. (It's good enough to amortize the annoyance of the pdf, linked elsewhere in this thread.) It has long seemed like merely a matter of time before piles of evidence for Sapir-Whorf come to light. Language is too big a part of who we are for things to be otherwise.

To take an example close to home, for me the most important factor in software design is to develop language for talking about the problem, translate that language into code, then evolve it as one learns more about the problem. It's surprising how small changes in one's problem language (like renaming something) can trigger a cascade of valuable ideas.

knwang• 15 years ago

Brought up in China and having been in the US for the last 11 years, I find it very true how languages shape thoughts and behaviors. When I speak English a different set of thoughts would come to me than when I speak Chinese. In fact even when I think in different languages I tend to see things in different ways.

lachenmayer• 15 years ago

I find exactly the same when I switch from German to English. I find that German is so extremely structured that it really forces you to think about what you're going to say. One thing I love about German too is the fact that complicated words are really just simple words stuck together. This reveals some amazing extra meanings sometimes. A great example of this is the word for "vocabulary", "Wortschatz", which is made up of Wort = word, Schatz = treasure. A treasure trove of words indeed!

yxhuvud• 15 years ago

Yes, the ability to form new words like that is very powerful. In the beginning the concatenated words tend to stay close to the original separate meanings of the word, but sometimes they start to stray.

(and for the record, the swedish variant of vocabulary is 'ordförråd', which literally mean a store of words)

carussell• 15 years ago

Lera Boroditsky (the author of the Scientific American article) on how language shapes thought on Fora.tv: http://fora.tv/2010/10/26/Lera_Boroditsky_How_Language_Shape... (1 hour 41 minutes).

blakerobinson• 15 years ago

This is really the basis for much of literary theory and modern criticism.

Ferdinand de Saussure used Structuralism to demonstrate relationships among the sign, the signifier and the signified. This is basically the necessary process of using the intangibilities of language to inadequately, but necessarily, represent the tangibilities of the real world.

It's pretty interesting stuff.

rhizome4• 15 years ago

Language is a lossy codec for thought.

andrewcooke2• 15 years ago

how do they separate culture from language? i am bilingual. i switch between english and spanish depending on the cultural context. sure, my behaviour changes - but why is that connected with the language, and not with the culture?

brockf2• 15 years ago

Most of her research doesn't discuss external social behaviours, but rather the core cognitive systems and responses to external phenomena. So, in a heavily controlled experimental lab session with just you looking at stimuli, your perceptual mechanisms may differ purely based on your primed language. That would control for culture (or some might argue - I'm not entirely sure culture isn't primed by language).

andrewcooke2• 15 years ago

but that is making some big assumptions about how different parts of the brain are isolated from each other, isn't it? if my brain is one big neural net then firing up a bunch of neurons that are trained in one language could also activate neurons trained in the associated culture. there's still no way to know that it's the choice of language, rather than the culture context, that is important.

[edit:] traditionally you work around this kind of thing by finding subjects that differ only in one variable. identical twins, for example, might better show environmental differences, because they have common genomes. but while that works for nature/nurture i have no idea how you do something similar for culture/language.

george_morgan• 15 years ago

I’ve often wondered if there is a parallel to the concept of Turing-completeness in linguistics. Once a language possesses certain principle structures, would it be capable of expressing all human thought?

I understand that linguistic relativity argues that a language’s structure directs the scope of thought, but couldn’t it be argued that these effects are largely cultural?

Two Turing-complete programming languages can naturally suggest quite different solutions when presented with the same problem, but they would both ultimately solve the problem—or in the linguistics parallel, both express the same thought.

Maybe we’re back to the adage that it’s easy to solve a problem, but much harder to find a novel one to solve.

So there could still be a defence of linguistic/programming relativity. That as certain programming languages invite particular problems to be solved, certain spoken languages invite particular thoughts to be expressed.

andrewflnr• 15 years ago

I'm not a linguist, but here goes:

I'm not sure any language can express ALL human thought. I think as you try to fully specify a given thought, verbosity will increase without bound. Everything is connected in a brain.

I do think that there is a certain set of ideas that, once a language can express them, it's roughly equivalent to any other language that can express the same ideas.

I used to be really interested in figuring out how to specify this set, but I don't think it's too hard to achieve. It's not nearly as interesting a problem as how to express thoughts efficiently. We don't usually need to consider Turing-completeness when designing programming languages, either.

jackpirate• 15 years ago

It's like programming. Sure you can do the same things in C++ and perl, but which would you rather implement a text parser in? Surely a prolog hacker will approach a problem differently than a javascript one?

Natural languages, I think are probably just as differentiated, even if it's harder for us to recognize it.

bugsbunnyak• 15 years ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar

satori99• 15 years ago

Fan's of Iain M banks "Culture", novels already know this

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture#Language

levesque• 15 years ago

Am I the only one who finds the introduction extremely weak?

I am all for the study of how language might shape thought, but then again, he points to an example of a little girl living in an aboriginal community. In this case it has nothing to do with the person's language, all with environment in which they live.

brockf2• 15 years ago

It's meant to bring about the same "what the ?!?!" and "how the ?!?!?" response you experienced. *She's pointing to something which we would all say "it's just culture!" and explains how it is (might be) language.

mconnor• 15 years ago

There is an interesting discussion (take down?) of a set of these experiments as referenced in Lera Boroditsky's previous WSJ piece at language log:

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592

Of course Liberman seems to be firmly against this new spate of Sapir-Whorf ideas. Personally I think the distinction between languages is less relevant than distinction between metaphors used, which of course may vary by language. This manifests itself in cases even with single language speakers: if readers are given two different metaphors for the same topic, they will behave differently (crime as a virus vs. crime as a beast being their example).

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjourna...

Which the US government is interested in for terrorist understanding:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/05/why-ar...

lars512• 15 years ago

This article is effectively discussing the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which in its strong form says that language constrains the thoughts you can have, and in it's weak form says that language merely influences your thoughts. Wikipedia's article on linguistic relativity probably explains it better.

The strong form is clearly false -- when was the last time you wanted to say something but struggled to find the right word that expressed just the nuance you meant? In the end, you may have settled for a more complicated explanation, simply because you didn't know of an English word that fitted. The lack of the word didn't stop you having the thought or feeling though.

On the other hand, the weak hypothesis is clearly true. Some of the article's examples show that you can't have simple expressions in some languages without being expressing gender, compass direction, seniority, etc. To express these things, you need to mentally aware of them, at least in the sense of having some background cognitive machinery that makes it available to you when forming utterances.

It will be very interesting to see how the evidence converges over time.

w1ntermute• 15 years ago

This is why if I learn a second language, I would want it to be Ilaksh - it's an a priori philosophical/logical language. I wonder what kind of effect learning a language like that would have on my ability to reason.

tokenadult• 15 years ago

The strong version of this hypothesis is surely untrue. If it were true, we might conclude that some languages that I speak that lack marked gender in the languages' grammar are spoken among native speakers who are "less sexist" than speakers of languages in which gender is strongly marked. The real-world observation, if anything, is the other way around. I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language background.

My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United States, but three of the four spoke languages other than English at home, and my two maternal grandparents had all of their schooling in German.

German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Hebrew, Japanese (first in the medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc. For several years, my occupation was Chinese-English consecutive interpretation for people traveling to the United States from Chinese-speaking places to meet government officials or businesspersons here. My observations of many speakers of many languages, and trying to think in two languages in the same conversation while doing my interpreting work, convince me that people's thoughts are much less constrained by their native languages than by the family backgrounds they have, the educations they receive, and the mass media they consume.

meric• 15 years ago

>> The strong version of this hypothesis is surely untrue. If it were true, we might conclude that some languages that I speak that lack marked gender in the languages' grammar are spoken among native speakers who are "less sexist" than speakers of languages in which gender is strongly marked. The real-world observation, if anything, is the other way around. I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language background.

"The real-world observation, if anything, is the other way around." You have surely not certainly convinced me that languages and thought are not correlated.

Continuing along your observations: Perhaps speakers of languages with marked genders respect differences between two genders. "Equal but different". Speakers of other languages may try to fit both genders into the same stereotypes and find their expectations are not met, resulting in a "sexist" response.

TheNewAndy• 15 years ago

If you enjoy this stuff, I would highly recommend reading "Le Ton Beu De Marot" by Hofstadter (of Gödel, Escher, Bach fame). It is a really interesting look at the issues of translating between languages. A lot of it is looking at the difficulty of separating form and content (which is especially obvious in poetry).

For example, if you were translating my paragraph up above, would you know that I wanted to write "If you are interested in this stuff", but I didn't because I used the word "interesting" in the next sentence? If you were translating into a language which had two words which roughly meant "interesting", then would it be more or less faithful to use those two words, rather than translating "enjoy"?

kgc• 15 years ago

http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/sci-am-2011.pdf

How language shapes thought

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