FW: Does Language Influence Culture? - WSJ.com

[Sarah Wagner]

Well, in the psychological sense--that is, do brain waves change? requires a
different testing methodology than linguists generally go for.  I find it
frustrating that she wouldn't refer to any linguist except Chomsky, who
could care less what people do with their language.  I also find it curious
that (in my experience) linguists and psychologists seem to be working on
such different methodological planes, even when the questions are the same.
The fact that we've long studied these questions, and have gone well beyond
them, is not acknowledged here--why?  And we sociolinguists seem to tend to
disregard their studies and methods as well.  How is it useful to keep these
two fields completely separate?

Thanks for the article.  I'd be interested to hear more from the Anthro side
of this.

Sarah Wagner
UT Austin Linguistics

On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 9:38 PM, Gaudio, Rudolf
<Rudolf.Gaudio at purchase.edu>wrote:

> Colleagues:
>
> What do you make of this article? One passage in particle mystifies me:
>
>   "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."
>
> In what sense could the claim that "very little empirical work had been
> done.. until recently" be true? Or is it just a marketing ploy?
>
> Look forward to your comments.
>
> Rudi
>
> Rudolf P. Gaudio
> Associate Professor of Anthropology
> Purchase College, State University of New York
> Purchase, NY 10577
>
>
> +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
>
>    * The Wall Street Journal
>    * LIFE & STYLE
>    * JULY 24, 2010
>
> LOST IN TRANSLATION
> New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way
> people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish
>
>
>
> By LERA BORODITSKY
>
> The Tower of Babel' by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1563.
>
> 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.
> 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."
>
> 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.
> Journal Community
>
>    * discuss
>
>    “ 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
>
> 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.
> —Lera Boroditsky is a professor of psychology at Stanford University and
> editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.
>
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