Language and Thought

Martha’s Vineyard: A Case Study in Language and Identity

• In 1961, William Labov conducted a sociolinguistic study on the island of Martha’s Vineyard in Dukes County, Massachusetts, to investigate the impact of social patterns on linguistic variation and change. The linguistic feature chosen for analysis was centralization of the diphthongs /ɑɪ/ and /ɑʊ/, as in why and wow, to [əɪ] and [əʊ], respectively.

• Centralization was a linguistic feature of Martha’s Vineyard and thus regional in character. That is, residents of the island pronounced /ɑɪ/ and /ɑʊ/ as [əɪ] and [əʊ], while summer tourists and mainland residents did not centralize the diphthongs. But within the island population, some residents centralized, while some did not.

• Example finding: High school students planning to go to college and then return to the island exhibited greater centralization than those going to college but not planning to return to the island

• We can summarize the effects in terms of group identification. How closely speakers identified with the island—e.g., wanted to remain, wanted to enter into the mainstream, saw themselves as Vineyarders and were proud of it, was positively correlated with the degree of centralization

Linguistic Relativity

• Languages differ!

  • Some languages mark the grammatical gender of all nouns and adjectives; some languages do not mark gender at all.

  • Some languages distinguish several tenses grammatically; some have no grammatically marked tenses.

  • Some languages have counting systems that consist of ‘one,’ ‘two,’ and ‘many’; some languages have much more elaborate inventories of numbers.

• Do these differences between languages also indicate differences in the thoughts of their speakers?

  • Does speaking a language without tense markers mean you will think about time differently?

  • Does using politically correct terminology change speakers’ perception of women, people with disabilities, and others?

  • Does the grammatical gender of a word influence how we think of it?

• Consider the following words that exist in other languages.

• Does the existence (or absence) of a word affect how you notice or value that feeling?

• Do you have any more examples from languages you speak?

  • Saudade (Portuguese; An emotional state of melancholic or profoundly nostalgic longing for a beloved yet absent someone or something. It is often associated with a repressed understanding that one might never encounter the object of longing ever again.)

• Fernweh (German; The opposite of being homesick. It's when you're yearning to be somewhere else (mainly to discover the world). Its literal translation would probably be something like "painfully longing for foreign/distant regions".)

• Verschlimmbesserung (German; In an attempt to make something better actually making something worse. Example: Trying to repair the faucet and by doing so, causing a leak.)

 linguistic relativity hypothesis

• The linguistic relativity hypothesis argues that the language someone speaks affects how they perceive the world.

• There are two versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

  • The weak version, called linguistic relativity, claims that language affects thought.

  • The strong version, called linguistic determinism, claims that language determines thought; speakers of a language can think of things only in the way that their language expresses them.

• We will focus on linguistic relativity here, as it's better empirically supported than linguistic determinism

• Linguistic relativity is also sometimes called the Whorf hypothesis or the Sapir-Whorf 

  hypothesis, although the two men never formally worked together on this topic.

• Whorf defined linguistic relativity as: “users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world” (1956: 58).

• Essentially, this means that the language someone speaks affects how they perceive the world

Example Studies: Gendered Nouns

• Premise: In German and Spanish, nouns have grammatical gender (which is distinct from natural gender). For example, bridge has a female grammatical gender in German and a male grammatical gender in Spanish; vice versa for key.

• Experiment design: German and Spanish speakers were asked to describe everyday objects that differed in grammatical gender.

• Results: German and Spanish showed that the grammatical gender of an inanimate object can influence the way speakers consider it.

  • German speakers described the key as hard, heavy, metal, jagged, or useful, while Spanish speakers described the key as little, lovely, intricate, tiny, or shiny.

• German speakers described the bridge as pretty, peaceful, elegant, beautiful, and fragile, while Spanish speakers called it strong, dangerous, sturdy, and towering

Spatial Language

• In English, we use relative terms such as left, right, front, and back to indicate the spatial orientation of one object to another: The chair is to the left of the table, etc.

• In Tenejapan Tzeltal (a Mayan language spoken in Mexico), speakers use absolute terms similar to north, south, east, and west instead. That is, they use a fixed point of reference to locate particular objects (e.g., the chair is to the north of the table) rather than using relative reference points that may change based on the location of the speaker.

• Tzeltal and English speakers respond very differently in experimental tasks that require them to describe objects they see in the world

• Example Studies 

  • (e.g., see Levinson 1996a, 1996b, and Brown and Levinson 1993)

• Procedure: Participant is seated at a table with an arrow on it (the stimulus). The participant is asked to look at the arrow and remember which direction it points. The participant is then turned 180 degrees. Two arrows are shown, A and B, pointing in opposite directions. Question: Which one matches the arrow from earlier?

• Results: Speakers of a language with a relative frame of reference (e.g., English) consistently choose arrow B, while speakers of a language with an absolute frame of reference, such as Tzeltal, consistently choose arrow A!

• Potential explanation: For English speakers, the stimulus arrow goes from their left to their right; when they are turned around, they still choose an arrow that goes from their left to their right (arrow B).

• For Tzeltal speakers, on the other hand, the stimulus arrow points from south to north, regardless of which way they are facing; when they are turned around, they still choose an arrow that goes from south to north (arrow A)

Example Studies: Spatial Language & Time

• In Kuuk Thaayorre, a language spoken by the Thaayorre people in Northern Australia, they similarly don't use words like "left" and "right," but directions instead (north, 

  south, east and west).

• For example: There's an ant on your southwest leg; Move your cup to the north-northeast a little bit.

• Even for saying "hello," the speakers say "Which way are you going?" And the answer should be, "North-northeast in the far distance. How about you?" Now close your eyes... Where is South? High disagreement shows big difference in cognitive ability across languages

• Procedure: Participants were handed a shuffled set of cards and asked to lay the cards out on the ground so that they were in the correct order

• After the participant arranged half of the card sets, the experimenter explained that it was necessary to get a different angle for the camera and asked the participant to sit in a different place before continuing with the task

• Results: 

  • For Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, time doesn't appear to be locked on the body at all, but on the landscape. So, time is perceived rather in relation to a fixed reference point, as opposed to a relative reference point.

• Similarly, in Tzeltal, time “is conceived of as stretching up to the south” (Levinson 1996), whereas in English, time tends to be conceived of as stretching either from left (past) to right (future) or from behind (past) to in front (future)

Example Studies: Color

• There is a universal color continuum, but different languages have different ways of dividing this continuum into discrete categories.

• English is argued to be an eleven-term language, as are Japanese and Hebrew.

• Russian has twelve basic terms with the standard eleven + a distinction between siniy ‘dark blue’ and goluboy ‘light blue.’

• Shona is a typical three-term language: citema covers ‘black,’ cicena ‘white,’ and cipswuka ‘red’.

• Russian speakers have a lifetime of experience of linguistically distinguishing light blue 

  and dark blue.

• Premise: The linguistic distinction in categories affects visual perception.

• Procedure: Russian speaking participants see two shades of blue on a computer screen and are asked to determine, as quickly as possible, whether the two blue colors were different from each other or the same as each other.

• Results: Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They're faster to be able to tell the difference between a light and dark blue, rather than two shades of goluboy or two shades of siniy

• Follow-up work: Does the linguistic distinction in the Russian blues help the brain to become consciously aware of a stimulus that might otherwise go unnoticed?

• Task: "Attentional Blink." Participants are asked to monitor a sequence of stimuli, displayed at high speeds (typically at least 10 per second), and to press a button every time they see a certain item

• Participants are very good at detecting the first target they see, but if a second target follows immediately after the first, or with a lag of two to three items, the second target can be missed.

• → The brain’s attentional system “blinked”: The brain was busy processing the first target and didn't have attentional resources to spare to detect the second target

• Task: Press a button when they saw either a semicircle or a triangle

Example Studies Color: Prediction

• Prediction: For Russians speakers, contrasting light and dark blue should be as salient as the contrast between dark green and dark blue (always being careful to keep 

  perceptual similarity between contrasting stimuli comparable).

• Results: The linguistic distinction of the Russian blues helps stimuli enter conscious awareness.

• As expected, green triangles on green backgrounds, were missed the most; blue/green was missed the least.

• Crucially, the contrast between light blue and dark blue grabbed the brain’s attention centers more than the light green/dark green contrast.

• This was also found in a study of Greek speakers, who also have this distinction.

• For German speakers (who, like in English, only have one term for blue), the detection rates of the blue/blue and green/green trials were identical

• We can even find this signal in the brain!

• EEG study results during the attentional blink task:

  • When blue contrasts were detected (meaning the blink was avoided), an event related potential (ERP) occurred that is known to accompany the stage of early visual processing.

• This neural signature was not present for the light green/dark green stimulus, indicating that the brain processes the light blue/dark blue differently, for speakers whose language makes a lexical distinction

Example Studies: Event Descriptions

• Languages also differ in how they describe events!

• Even if it was an accident, in English, it's fine to say, "He broke the vase." In a language like Spanish, you might rather say, "The vase broke," or, "The vase broke 

  itself."

• Procedure: Researchers showed the same accident to English speakers and Spanish speakers.

• Results: English speakers are more likely to remember who did it, whereas Spanish speakers might be less likely to remember who did it if it's an accident, but they're more 

  likely to remember that it was an accident. This has implications for eyewitness testimony, etc.