Language influences the way you think (fwd)

[Natasha L Warner]

Hello,

Dr. Kita, whose work has been discussed on this list lately, asked me to
post the following message for him.  (He is a former colleague of mine.)
As he suggests at the end of his message, please copy him at
sotaro.kita at bristol.ac.uk on any responses.  Also, I am afraid my email
program is not encoding the characters of Dr. Kita's collaborator's last
name correctly in the message below.  For clarity, her name is Asli
OEzyuerek.

Thanks,

Natasha Warner

Dear Dr. Senarslan and readers of ILAT,

One of my colleagues has told me that some discussions are going on in
ILAT about our work, which was recently covered by mass media.  The
difficulty of such a situation is that what people see is not our work
itself, but a journalist's summary of our work (or, in many cases, a
journalist's summary of another journalist's summary).

Some of the messages in ILAT (not Dr. Senarslan's) seem to interpret our
work to be a "deficit grammar" study,  making an English superiority
claim.  This characterization is completely inaccurate.  The study has
been published in the following journal.

Kita, Sotaro, & Özyürek, Asli (2003). What does cross-linguistic
variation in semantic coordination of speech and gesture reveal?:
Evidence for an interface representation of spatial thinking and
speaking. Journal of Memory and Language, 48, 16-32.

I would appreciate it if you could base your scholary criticisms on our
publication, from now on.  If you do not have access to this journal, I
am happy to send you a PDF version of the published article.

Another thing that did not get through the media is that this is a
collaborative work between myself and Dr. Asli Özyürek (Max Planck
Institute for Psycholinguistics, the Netherlands).

Back to linguistics,  there are a couple of messages that point out that
Turkish (Dr. Senarslan) and Japanese (Dr. Ward) do have a verb to
swing.  As I will explain later, whether or not Turkish and Japanese
have a certain verb or not is not really the central issue in our study.
But, let me discuss the issue of the existence of swinging verbs in
Japanese and Turkish first.

Dr. Senarslan pointed out that Turkish sal could refer to swinging.
According to my collaborator, who is a Turkish speaker, sal  roughly
means dangling (one end of a long thin object is fixed, and the other
end is free and is capable of moving about).  Though sal and swing have
some referential overlap, sal is not really felicitous in description of
an event in which an animate figure swings on a rope from Point A to
Point B.

Dr. Ward recently pointed out that Japanese yureru could refer to
swinging. Yureru roughly means swaying (one end of a long thin object is
fixed, and the other end is free and moves about). Unlike in sal, yureru
entails movement (but the movement is not directed). In addition, yureru
does not refer to intentional action; thus yureru cannot refer to Tarzan
swinging from one tree to another.   Yureru has referential overlap with
swing, but it is not really felicitous in description of an event in
which an animate figure swings on a rope from Point A to Point B.

The precise semantics of these related verbs is not really the crucial
point of our study.  The crucial point is that the English speakers
encoded different set of information from Japanese and Turkish speakers
when they described a scene from an animated cartoon.  This is the scene
in which Sylvester the cat swings on a rope from one building to another
in his attempt to catch Tweetie bird. None of the 15 Japanese and 17
Turkish speakers, who talked about this event, did not encode the arc
trajectory (they simply said something like, "the cat went/flew to the
other side"), where as 16 English speakers all used the verb "swing" and
thus encoded the arc trajectory.  Obviously, there are many other
differences.  All Turkish speakers encoded evidentiality, and most
speakers of the other languages did not, and all Japanese spakers
encoded addressee-honorification but most speakers of the other
languages did not.  We focused on encoding of spatial information in
speech in our study since iconic co-speech gesture is believed to be
driven by underlying spatial and motoric imagery that the speaker
activates at the moment of speaking (McNeill, 1992).  We found that
Japanese and Turkish speakers are more likely to produce a gesture that
moves straight, namely, that does NOT encode the arc trajectory than
English speakers.  Based on the assumption that co-speech iconic
gestures reveal important aspects of the speaker's imagery at the moment
of speaking, we concluded that the imagery that speaker generates at the
moment of speaking is influenced by how the speech production process
organizes information.  We suggested that adjusting the content of
imagery according to the preference of the speech production process
might facilitate verbalization of thought.

The above article include analysis of how Manner and Path of a motion
event is expressed in speech and in gesture in the three languages.  All
three languages expressed both Manner and Path of a particular event in
the cartoon, but the syntax they used were different.  And, the
linguistic difference was mirrored in a gestural difference.  For the
sake of brevity, I will not go into further details.

One caveat is that our study only makes a claim about linguistic
influence on the imagery that the speaker generates at the moment of
speaking.  It does not make any claim about  lingusitic effects on
thoughts outside the context of speaking.

I hope that this clarifies things a bit.  As I do not subscribe to ILAT,
please CC your posting to ILAT also to <Sotaro.Kita at bristol.ac.uk>.
Thank you very much!

Reference
McNeill, David. (1992). Hand and mind. University of Chicago Press.

Best regards,
Sotaro Kita

-- 
Dr. Sotaro Kita

University of Bristol
Dept. of Experimental Psychology
8 Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1TN
United Kingdom

(Tel) +44-(0)117-928-8562
(Fax) +44-(0)117-928-8588
From outside of UK, skip the 0 in ().

sotaro.kita at bristol.ac.uk


*******************************************************************************
Natasha Warner
Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics
University of Arizona
PO Box 210028
Tucson, AZ 85721-0028