Ask HN: Does language complexity affect reasoning?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48920132

by zecice • 7 days ago

4 6 7 days ago

news.ycombinator.com

I've been thinking about this question lately. Could the grammatical complexity of a child's first language play a part in their cognitive development? In the sense: more complex / complicated language -> superior reasoning skills (at least in the early years).

axegon_• 7 days ago

I would argue that it does but not exactly as you describe it.

Languages have a lot of subtle, underlying characteristics which aren't obvious at first glance. I speak 3 languages(all European but from different families), 2 of which are sort of my first, the third one I learned in my early teenage years and ended up studying in that language in uni(that would be Spanish). As far as computer science, imo, Spanish was horrible (the available resources in Spanish were pretty scarce in the early 2010s) so what I did was to use the English documentation and resources, study that and translate it back into Spanish last second, along with learning the Spanish terminology. From an idiomatic standpoint, Spanish had one more weakness: generally questions are not structurally defined so in day to day conversations, the only difference between asking and answering a question relies entirely on your intonation(and that truly broke my brain). But it seems that the mixture of those languages in my head had some other side effects: how I think to myself/reason, as in I don't think in a single language but the one that's most suitable for the topic I'm thinking about. But if I am(or have been talking to someone) about a specific topic in one language I'll carry on in that language in my head.

English is a great language for much of that: it doesn't carry too many irregularities and can be both verbose and on point at the same time. Others carry a lot of additional information which is commonly irrelevant and can be inferred at-runtime: prefixes and suffixes and grammatical cases.

From a computational standpoint, Esperanto may be the perfect language because you could write all the rules of the language into a program and it would generate 100% grammatically correct sentences in all instances. Disclaimer: I've only explored very vaguely what Esperanto is and people that know it have told me it creates a fair bit of ambiguities.

However, I can only appreciate all of those are characteristics and properties now but otherwise I could have gone my whole life without knowing about any of them. For reference, just a few weeks ago I discovered that I have something called aphantasia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia) and had I not stumbled upon the Wikipedia article, I could have gone my entire life without realizing that "Picture an apple in your head" is not a figure of speech(which is what I used to believe).

vunderba• 7 days ago

I don't think it's quite that simple - but I'd recommend reading up on the Whorf hypothesis.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/whorfianism.h...

zecice2• 7 days ago

thanks, it is an interesting read

segmondy• 7 days ago

As someone that speaks multiple languages, I don't think so. I think vocabulary is what affects reasoning. The more words the better.

zecice2• 7 days ago

In that case I could argue that some languages "have" more words than other right? I really like what J. L. Borges has to say on this: https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/1dndxqf/argentine_w...

However, I would say that english is on the less complex side of languages (from my experience) ...

rramadass• 7 days ago

The answer is not settled;

Language complexity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_complexity

Evidence reveals that the language of thought is not natural language - https://medicalxpress.com/news/2026-07-evidence-reveals-lang...

Complexity trade-offs and equi-complexity in natural languages: a meta-analysis - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10234276/

Language as a mechanism for reasoning about possibilities - https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9620752/

Ask HN: Does language complexity affect reasoning?

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