Which comes first, language or thought? (fwd)

[phil cash cash]

Which comes first, language or thought?
Babies think first
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html

By William J. Cromie
Harvard News Office

It's like the chicken and egg question. Do we learn to think before we
speak, or does language shape our thoughts? New experiments with
five-month-olds favor the conclusion that thought comes first.

"Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about
objects," says Elizabeth Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard.
"These concepts give meaning to the words they learn later."

Speakers of different languages notice different things and so make
different distinctions. For example, when Koreans say that one object
joins another, they specify whether the objects touch tightly or
loosely. English speakers, in contrast, say whether one object is in or
on another. Saying "I put the spoon cup" is not correct in either
language. The spoon has to be "in" or "on" the cup in English, and has
to be held tightly or loosely by the cup in Korean.

These differences affect how adults view the world. When Koreans and
Americans see the same everyday events (an apple in a bowl, a cap on a
pen), they categorize them in accord with the distinctions of their
languages. Because languages differ this way, many scientists suspected
that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their
language. That's wrong, Spelke insists.

Infants of English-speaking parents easily grasp the Korean distinction
between a cylinder fitting loosely or tightly into a container. In
other words, children come into the world with the ability to describe
what's on their young minds in English, Korean, or any other language.
But differences in niceties of thought not reflected in a language go
unspoken when they get older.

Spelke and Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in
Nashville, Tenn., did some clever experiments to show that the idea of
tight/loose fitting comes before the words that are used/not used to
describe it.

When babies see something new, they will look at it until they get
bored. Hespos and Spelke used this well-known fact to show different
groups of five-month-olds a series of cylinders being placed in and on
tight- or loose-fitting containers. The babies watched until they were
bored and quit looking. After that happened, the researchers showed
them other objects that fit tightly or loosely together. The change got
and held their attention for a while, contrary to American college
students who failed to notice it. This showed that babies raised in
English-speaking communities were sensitive to separate categories of
meaning used by Korean, but not by English, adult speakers. By the time
the children grow up, their sensitivity to this distinction is lost.

Other experiments show that infants use the distinction between tight
and loose fits to predict how a container will behave when you move the
object inside it. This capacity, then, "seems to be linked to
mechanisms for representing objects and their motions," Hespos and
Spelke report.

Their findings suggest that language reduces sensitivity to thought
distinctions not considered by the native language. "Because chimps and
monkeys show similar expectations about objects, languages are probably
built on concepts that evolved before humans did," Spelke suggests.

The researchers describe their experiments and conclusions in the July
22 issue of the scientific journal Nature.

The sounds of meaning

Their findings parallel experiments done by others, which show that,
before babies learn to talk for themselves, they are receptive to the
sounds of all languages. But sensitivity to nonnative language sounds
drops after the first year of life. "It's not that children become
increasingly sensitive to distinctions made in the language they are
exposed to," comments Paul Bloom of Yale University. Instead, they
start off sensitive to every distinction that languages make, then they
become insensitive to those that are irrelevant. They learn what to
ignore, Bloom notes in an article accompanying the Hespos/Spelke
report.

As with words, if a child doesn't hear sound distinctions that it is
capable of knowing, the youngster loses his or her ability to use them.
It's a good example of use it or lose it. This is one reason why it is
so difficult for adults to learn a second language, Bloom observes.
"Adults' recognition of nonnative speech sounds may improve with
training but rarely attains native facility," Spelke adds.

Speech is for communicating so once a language is learned nothing is
lost by ignoring sounds irrelevant to it. However, contrasts such as
loose-versus-tight fit help us make sense of the world. Although mature
English speakers don't spontaneously notice these categories, they have
little difficulty distinguishing them when they are pointed out.
Therefore, the effect of language experience may be more dramatic at
the crossroad of hearing and sound than at the interface of thinking
and word meaning, Hespos and Spelke say.

Even if babies come equipped with all concepts that languages require,
children may learn optional word meanings differently. Consider
"fragile" or "delicately," which, unlike "in," you can leave out when
you say "she delicately placed the spoon in the fragile cup."

One view, Bloom points out, "is that there exists a universal core of
meaningful distinctions that all humans share, but other distinctions
that people make are shaped by the forces of language. On the other
hand, language learning might really be the act of learning to express
ideas that already exist," as in the case of the situation studied by
Hespos and Spelke.

There are lots of situations involving the relation between ideas and
language that Hespos and Spelke did not address, so the debate is still
open. Do people think before they speak or do words shape their
thoughts?