Ling 423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics           

Ben Bergen

 

Meeting 13: Linguistic relativism

October 7, 2008

 

Homework 2 wrap-up

 

Part II of the class: Linguistic relativism

 

Languages differ in how they describe the world.

 

á      Linguistic determinism (strong Whorf hypothesis): How a language cuts up the world determines how people who speak that language can think about the world.

á      Linguistic relativism (weak Whorf hypothesis): How a language cuts up the world influences how people who speak that language think about the world.

 

Determinism is mostly dead, but relativism is experiencing a resurgence.

 

Languages cut up space differently.

á      For example, while English separates containment relations (in) from support relations (on), Korean differentiates between tight fit (kitta) and loose fit (nehta).

á      Preferential looking paradigm and which-one-of these-things-is-not-like-the-others tasks demonstrate that Korean speaking adults group tight fitting spatial relations together, English speakers do not.

á      However, prelinguistic infants, now matter whether they're in an English- or Korean-speaking household, do categorize on the basis of tightness of fit.

á      This implies that learning English makes adults less sensitive to this distinction.

 

Many languages distinguish between mass and count nouns, but others, like Yucatec Mayan, do not.

á      In this language, all nouns take shape classifiers, so two candles is two long thin units of wax.

á      Does this configuration yield increased attention to the substance that objects are made of?

á      In a triad task, Yucatec Mayan Ss asked which of two objects was more similar to a third grouped objects together on the basis of substance (not shape) more than English Ss did.

 

Some languages give grammatical genders to their nouns.

á      Do the genders of the nouns in your language influence how you think of the objects expressed by those nouns?

á      German and Spanish speakers were asked to list properties of certain objects for which they were provided pictures, in English.

á      Those objects whose nouns were feminine in the speaker's native language were described using more female-like properties and masculine nouns got male-like descriptions.

 

So while there isn't evidence that language determines cognition, there's lots of evidence that even the little quirks of language influences perception, memory, attention, and categorization.