New cognitive research suggests that language
profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of
blame in Japanese and Spanish
The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.
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The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.
The Gallery Collection/Corbis
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Do the languages we speak shape the way we
think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in
languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we
wish to express?
Take "Humpty Dumpty sat
on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much
languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the
verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In
Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark
tense.
In Russian, you would have to mark tense and
also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You
would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If
our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it
would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.
In Turkish, you would have to include
in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw
the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of
the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a
different form.
Do English, Indonesian,
Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and
remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak
different languages ?
These questions
touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with
important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little
empirical work had been done on these questions until recently. The idea
that language might shape thought was for a long time considered
untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry
of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does
profoundly influence how we see the world.
The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back
centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that "to have a second language is to
have a second soul." But the idea went out of favor with scientists when
Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and
'70s.
Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all
human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one
another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from
one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic
differences led to differences in thinking.
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Use Your Words
Some findings on how language can affect thinking.
- Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
- Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.
- The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities.
- In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase."
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The search for linguistic universals yielded
interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single
proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed
deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them
analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.
Of
course, just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean
they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have
begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think,
asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of
experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by
language.
For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote
Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don't use
terms like "left" and "right." Instead, everything is talked about in
terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which
means you say things like, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." To
say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, "Where are you going?", and an
appropriate response might be, "A long way to the south-southwest. How
about you?" If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't
get past hello.
About a third of the
world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on
absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic
training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying
oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar
landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were
beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally
different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.
Differences
in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their
spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract
representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship
relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently
about space, do they also think differently about other things, like
time?
To find out, my colleague Alice
Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans sets of pictures
that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at
different ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their
job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct
temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each
time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this,
English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it
from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).
Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from
east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right.
When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and
so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction
they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also
spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their
representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in
the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past
above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the
past in front.
In addition to space
and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example,
English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things.
English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for
accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say
"the vase broke itself." Such differences between languages have
profound consequences for how their speakers understand events,
construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as
eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.
In
studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English,
Spanish and Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons,
breaking eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally.
Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you
remember who did it? She discovered a striking cross-linguistic
difference in eyewitness memory. Spanish and Japanese speakers did not
remember the agents of accidental events as well as did English
speakers. Mind you, they remembered the agents of intentional events
(for which their language would mention the agent) just fine. But for
accidental events, when one wouldn't normally mention the agent in
Spanish or Japanese, they didn't encode or remember the agent as well.
In
another study, English speakers watched the video of Janet Jackson's
infamous "wardrobe malfunction" (a wonderful nonagentive coinage
introduced into the English language by Justin Timberlake), accompanied
by one of two written reports. The reports were identical except in the
last sentence where one used the agentive phrase "ripped the costume"
while the other said "the costume ripped." Even though everyone watched
the same video and witnessed the ripping with their own eyes, language
mattered. Not only did people who read "ripped the costume" blame Justin
Timberlake more, they also levied a whopping 53% more in fines.
Beyond
space, time and causality, patterns in language have been shown to
shape many other domains of thought. Russian speakers, who make an extra
distinction between light and dark blues in their language, are better
able to visually discriminate shades of blue. The Piraha, a tribe in the
Amazon in Brazil, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms
like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities. And
Shakespeare, it turns out, was wrong about roses: Roses by many other
names (as told to blindfolded subjects) do not smell as sweet.
Patterns
in language offer a window on a culture's dispositions and priorities.
For example, English sentence structures focus on agents, and in our
criminal-justice system, justice has been done when we've found the
transgressor and punished him or her accordingly (rather than finding
the victims and restituting appropriately, an alternative approach to
justice). So does the language shape cultural values, or does the
influence go the other way, or both?
Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to
suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages
think differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes
thought or the other way around. To demonstrate the causal role of
language, what's needed are studies that directly manipulate language
and look for effects in cognition.
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That language embodies different ways of knowing the world seems intuitive,
given the number of times we reach for a word or phrase in another language
that communicates that certain je ne sais quoi we can't find on our own.
—Steve Kallaugher
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One of the key advances in recent years has
been the demonstration of precisely this causal link. It turns out that
if you change how people talk, that changes how they think. If people
learn another language, they inadvertently also learn a new way of
looking at the world. When bilingual people switch from one language to
another, they start thinking differently, too. And if you take away
people's ability to use language in what should be a simple
nonlinguistic task, their performance can change dramatically, sometimes
making them look no smarter than rats or infants. (For example, in
recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a screen and asked to
say how many there were. If they were allowed to count normally, they
did great. If they simultaneously did a nonlinguistic task—like banging
out rhythms—they still did great. But if they did a verbal task when
shown the dots—like repeating the words spoken in a news report—their
counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their language skills
to count.)
All this new research shows
us that the languages we speak not only reflect or express our thoughts,
but also shape the very thoughts we wish to express. The structures
that exist in our languages profoundly shape how we construct reality,
and help make us as smart and sophisticated as we are.
Language
is a uniquely human gift. When we study language, we are uncovering in
part what makes us human, getting a peek at the very nature of human
nature. As we uncover how languages and their speakers differ from one
another, we discover that human natures too can differ dramatically,
depending on the languages we speak. The next steps are to understand
the mechanisms through which languages help us construct the incredibly
complex knowledge systems we have. Understanding how knowledge is built
will allow us to create ideas that go beyond the currently thinkable.
This research cuts right to the fundamental questions we all ask about
ourselves. How do we come to be the way we are? Why do we think the way
we do? An important part of the answer, it turns out, is in the
languages we speak.
Corrections and Amplifications
Japanese
and Spanish language speakers would likely say "the vase broke" or "the
vase was broken" when talking about an accident. This article says that
Japanese and Spanish speakers would be more likely to say "the vase
broke itself."
#Source:
Lost in Translation, By Lera Boroditsky
Lera Boroditsky is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.
Updated July 23, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET
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Related:
5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think
Jessica Gross
http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/19/5-examples-of-how-the-languages-we-speak-can-affect-the-way-we-think/
February 19, 2013 at 4:07 pm EDT#
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