Psycholinguistics 13

Language, Culture, and Cognition

Language, Culture, and Cognition

• Does the language we speak determine the way we think?

• Language reflects thought. Language is an instrument used to express thought.

Two opposing view of Ancient Greek Rhetoric

• Plato: Rhetorical theory should emphasize thought, truth, wisdom: language is therefore the expression of truth.

• Aristotle: Rhetorical theory should emphasize eloquence and form ---i.e. language and the techniques of effective presentation.

The Whorfian Hypothesis

• Language shapes thought patterns.

• Linguistic determinism: a language determines certain nonlinguistic cognitive processes.

• Linguistic relativity: cognitive processes that are determined are different for different languages.

Whorfian examples (Lexical)

• Differentiation: the number of words in a given domain in a lexicon. A more highly differentiated domain has more words, some of which express finer distinctions. E.g. Eskimo words for snow.

• Whorf suggested that the difference in differentiation can lead to differences in thinking, because when we encounter a particular word on a regular basis, it may influence our habitual thought patterns.

Whorfian Examples (Grammatical)• Grammatical characteristics vary from language to

language: In /English, lightening and spark are nouns, though they are temporary events. In Hopi, lightning is a verb because events of brief duration must be verbs.

• Count nouns (with definite outlines) vs. mass nouns (without clear boundaries). In English pluralized form of mass noun is: count noun + of + mass noun. That leads to think of objects as being “containers” (form) that hold “contents” (substance). Therefore English speakers think of objects as consisting of form and substance.

Problems with the Whorfian Hypothesis

• Whorf discussed many linguistic distinctions but provided no real evidence of their cognitive consequences.

• We need to assess language and cognition independently of each other, and in particular, cognitive processes independently from the linguistic features.

Testing the Whorf Hypothesis • Differences in languages: compare a language that

linguistically marks a particular conceptual distinction with a language that does not, or compare two languages that mark the same distinction in different ways.

• Differences in thinking: mainly habitual thought, routine ways of attending to objects and events, categorizing them, remembering them and even reflecting upon them. Habitual thought is contrasted to special thought, cognitive routines restricted to certain subgroups within a culture (e.g. intellectuals)

Lexical influence on cognition• Codability: Brown defined it as the length of a verba

l expression. The more words are needed for a phrase, the less codable the phrase is.

• Zipf’s law: the length of a word is negatively correlated with its frequency of usage. The more frequently a word is used in a language, the shorter the word (either in phonemes or syllables).

• Color naming test (Lenneberg) showed that colors with long names were named with hesitation, with disagreement from one person to another.

• The presence of a brief verbal expression in a language influences certain cognitive processes.

Basic color terms

• consist of only one morpheme• are not contained within another color• are not restricted to a small number of objects• are drawn from a hierarchy of 11 terms:

Purple

Black Red Yellow Blue Brown Pink

White Green Orange

Gray

Focal Colors

• the most representative example of various basic colors.

• Focal colors are more perceptually salient than nonfocal colors and this salience, in turn, influences the codability and memorability of a color.

Dani color terms

• Dani, a New Geunea people whose language consists of only two color terms—black and white. Rosch (1972) tests color naming on Dani and Americans: although Americans performed bettwe on the whole, both groups’ memory for focal colors was better than for nonfocal colors. Dani learn and remember colors much as we do.

Tarahumara color term test• Tarahumara, a Mexican Indian language that has a single

term for the blue-green color but not separate terms for blue and green. Kay (1984) tested Tarahumara and English speakers on color term naming, one chip of blue, one chip of green, the third of blue-green.

• Results: English speakers distinguished them either blue or green while Trahumara speakers named them blue-green. If English speakers were induced to call the intermediate ship both blue and green, the effect disappeared. The perception of colors appears to be dependent on the terms we use to refer to them. Linguistic and perceptual factors both influence color cognition.

Number terms• Morphological difference in number names between Asian

languages and English may influence children’s conceptualization of numbers and mathematic achievement.

• Chinese and English systems are more similar in naming 1 to 10 and beyond 99. But Chinese naming system is simpler in naming 11 to 99 (decade name plus unit name) while English is more irregular (from 13 or 19: unit name + decade name, from 20 to 99: decade name + unit name).

• Chinese preschoolers are no better than American preschoolers at counting between 1 and 10 or beyond 99 but are better at counting between 11 and 99. Chinese well documented mathematic achievement may has something to do with this.

Grammatical influences on cognition • Form perception• Navaho: the form of the verb for handling an

object varies with the form or shape of the object. The verb varies if the object is a long flexible object versus a long rigid object or a flat flexible object.

• Carroll’s test showed that the Navaho children did group the objects on the basis of form at an earlier age than the English-speaking children.

Counterfactual Reasoning • Chinese does not have a specific counterfactual form.• Sentence: If I am the US president, then I will think

before I speak.• (Bloom): Chinese speakers must integrate their

previous knowledge with the initial premise (I am the US president), and then negate this premise before relating it to the if/then statement.

• Reasoning: If A, then B; I know that A is not true; but if it were, then B would be true.

• Prediction: Chinese speakers would make more errors in counterfactual reasoning than English speakers.

Bloom’s Test

• Testing story: A Greek philosopher did not know Chinese, but if he had, he would have been influenced by Chinese culture and logic.

• Version 1: counterfactual—if he had known Chinese, he would have integrated the best features of Greek and Chinese systems.

• Version 2: noncounterfactual—he did not read the Chinese works, but they were translated for him. The story was incoherent unless one made a counterfactual interpretation.

Bloom’s Test

• Findings: • Version 1: 98% of American students and 6% of

Chinese students interpreted the story counterfactually.

• Version 2: 59% of the Chinese and 96% of the Americans interpreted the story counterfactually.

• Conclusion: The presence or absence of explicit marking of the counterfactual in one’s language influences the facility with which one uses this mode of thought.

Challenges • Au (1983,1984): Bloom’s stories were not suitable

for native speakers of Chinese. His revised versions led to much better performance.

• Bloom questioned Au’s participants who were bilinguals and test materials that were too simple.

• Liu (1985) conducted a test on monolingual Chinese (Grade 4 to Grade 11) using both abstract and concrete stories and found no support of Bloom’s conclusion but a strong developmental trend in the ability to reason counterfactually (from 20% correct in Grade 4 to 80% correct in Grade 11).

Cognitive Representation of Number

• Semantic features of noun phrase: animacy and discreteness. There are three groups: + animate (dog), -animate + discrete (shovel), -animate –discrete (mud)

• In English, plural is obligatorily applied to the first two groups, but not to the third.

• In Yucatec, a Mexicon Indian language, plural is applied to the first group, but not to the other two.

• English speakers are supposed to be more sensitive to shape while Yucatec speakers to substance.

• Test 1: participants described the picture scenes in their life. There were no differences between speakers in the frequency with which they specified the number of animate beings or nondiscrete substances.

• Test 2: participants were presented with three objects and asked to judge which two were most similar. E.g. a cardboard box, a plastic box, and a piece of cardboard. English speakers regarded two boxes as most similar while Yucatec speakers regarded the piece of cardboard as most similar to the cardboard box. This followed the linguistic classifications for each language.

Cognitive Representation of Number