W9 L1: Language and Thought

emboided cognition

  • the experience of living, sensing, and percieving the world fundamentally informs our conception of it

  • these emboided concepts underlie thought and language through conceptual methaphors

  • eg. being in a room vs. being in love

study - Up and Down

  • sky words and ocean words - yes if sky and no if ocean (or the other way around)

  • when whale was on the top of the screen/ helicopter at the bottom of the screen people responded slower (although still correclty)

  • because the type or was not in the orientation

results

  • “it may be that people perform a mental stimulation of the task-congruent location which directs spatial attention and facilitates processing of targets in that location” 

embodied cognition and imagery

study 

  • sentence - then asked if the an object (2 different images) appeared in the sentence

  • people take longer to say yes for one picture than the other because of their mental image if that object

  • eg. gree and brown leaf.

sapir-whorf hypothesis

  • does the language you speak shape the way you think?

  • if 2 languages have different featrues, this means the speakers of those languages might think differently

  • linguistic determinism: features of lanugage determine/constrain patterns of thought

  • if your language doesnt have “a word for” a particular idea/concept, you cant conceive of or understand it → “untranslatable”

Whorf and linguistic determinism

  • Claimed that Hopi (Native American language) has “no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time’” and therefore the Hopi had "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past“ (Whorf, 1956)

  • people who speak different languages think differently because their languages are different 

linguistic relativity

  • features of a language influence patterns of thought

  • what people can or do notice, descrimminate or remeber

colour categories

  • depends on the language

study - Berinmo tribe of New Guinea

  • Across tasks (similarity judgements, category learning, recognition memory) categorical perception of colour was aligned with colour terms

  • suggest that perception/thought is guided by language categories

who dunnit?

  • is there a difference between how often spanish and english speakers une these agentive (she broke) vs. non-agentive (it broke) contructions?

  • watch video → asked what happened

  • difference in language: no difference in intentional events, however,  in unintentional events english speakers used more agentic descriptions.

  • difference in memory: no difference for intentional events, however for unintentional events english speakers remembered the correct actor more frequently