Words Affect Our Reality - On The Right

The Whorf hypothesis claims that one's native language influences perception and thought. Researchers at UC-Berkeley and U-Chicago reasoned that, since language is predominantly processed in the left hemisphere of the brain, any effect on perception should have an effect predominantly on the right visual field, which is also processed on the left. After comparing reaction times for hues of blue-green -- colors with distinct names in one language but not another -- they concluded, in a just-published paper, that the Whorf hypothesis holds for the right visual field, but not the left.

Comments

You learn something new every day.

[TripMaster Monkey]

And all this time I thought the Worf hypothesis was just "Today is a good day to die.".

...the Whorf hypothesis holds for the right visual field, but not the left.

Apparently the left visual field is "without honor".

bi -lingual ??

[wesw02]

What if one is Bi-Lingual natively?

Re:bi -lingual ??

[greginnj]

Nali taka? Ne e vazmozhno! Zhena mi e syshto Bulgarka!

Our situation is even weirder; we met in France -- so we still speak French to each other. I speak English to the kids and she speaks Bulgarian to them (sometimes) and English sometimes. The kids are starting to pick up the French as well as the English and the Bulgarian. (Their Bulgarian gets more active after they spend the summer there.)

The one principle we decided on very early was -- Complete Sentences Only! Either a full sentence in English, or a full sentence in French, or in Bulgarian -- no mixing languages. This way, we prevent corrupting the kids' grammar, let alone our own. I've heard stories that Turkish children growing up in Germany who end up speaking and hearing a mishmash of the two languages end up being fluent in neither -- and could be said to have no native language of their own.

Do skoro!

Re:bi -lingual ??

[Knuckles]

Maybe another data point that helps. Someone I know is the daughter of an EU diplomat who has followed his frequent relocations. Being a diplomat's daughter, the schools she went to were good. She speaks German, English, French, Spanish, Italian, and Russian roughly equally well, i.e. fluently.

She says that she feels to have no first language in which whe is completely competent and "home", and that this sucks. She feels that there is no one language in which she can express herself completely.
Now, that might be a subjective feeling that not necessarily goes away if one does not have her "problem". I only speak German (first language) and English, and I surely don't feel completely competent in German, nor can I express myself "completely". One might even argue that if this was even possible, we would not have such a big body of adventurous poetry and prose in mature languages that over course of centuries tried ever new ways to express oneself "completely".
That said, I think I can see her point.

Questioned on the language she thinks in, she says that it depends on the language in which she first encountered a given topic or spent a lot of time to think about it. So, she thinks about relationship/"love" stuff in Spanish because she spent her first puberty years in Spain. And she thinks about professional problems in French because she studied mostly in France.

I always liked the reverse Whorf hypothesis..

[jcr]

I'm convinced that the Eskimos settled in the Arctic, because they had so many different words for "snow".

-jcr

Re:I always liked the reverse Whorf hypothesis..

[mopslik]

Of course, some of us have heard that this "large number of words for snow" story is somewhat misleading.

Huhu almost

[stonecypher]

It's actually called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, because it was primarily Edward Sapir's work.

Oh please oh please oh please oh please...

[Cranky Weasel]

...may the barrage of bad Star Trek jokes be peppered with the occasional enlightening, thoughtful tidbit...

The Whorf hypothisis?

[Cro Magnon]

Sorry, but a Klingon warrior knows as much about language as a pointy-eared Vulcan does about child care.

There was a similar study.

[OneBigWord]

I remember a similar study where a culture with only four words for colors could still distinguish different 'English' colors. It doesn't seem too surprising that it may take them a little longer.

Re:There was a similar study.

[lawpoop]

The human eye can distinguish millions of colors. This is true regardless of color names in a language.

You might be thinking of _Basic Color Terms_, or one of the studies used to counter it. _Basic Color Terms_ was an interesting anthropological and historical theory. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay looked at anthropological data and classical literature and came up with the theory that there are only 11 basic color categories in language. So for instance, if you hear that a tribe has only 6 different color words, they could tell you exactly what they are.

There are a lot of studies that either supported or offered evidence against this theory. It's pretty interesting, IMHO.

FWIW, here are the colors:

1. Dark (or black, if you have 3 or more colors)
2. Light (or white, if you have more than 3 colors)
3. Red
4. Yellow or Green (pick one)
5. Yellow or Green (pick whichever you didn't pick above)
6. Blue
7. brown
8. purple
9. pink
10. orange
11. gray

The thing about their theory is that you have the colors in this order. So if your tribe has two color words, they are dark and light. If you have 4 words, they are black, white, red, and either yellow or green.

Berlin and Kay went into depth describing exactly what counted as a color. For instance, a descriptive word that applies solely to an object or material, such as copper, was discluded ( I think there as usage from Homer that Berlin and Kay discluded ). There was an ethnography where an anthropolgist tried to use a descriptive term for the color of a green plant to describe a green dress. The people he was with only had black, white and red; they held that the term he was using could only be applied to that particular plant. The anthropologist thought it was a general term for green, but no, it only applied to a particular plant species, not any plant, nor any other green thing.

Re:There was a similar study.

[Valdrax]

I already know of two languages that doesn't follow this order -- Japanese and the language mentioned in the article, Tarahumara. Much like Tarahumara, Japanese has a word that covers both blue and green (aoi). However, Japanese also has a word that covers just green (midori).

However, Japanese has had words for brown, purple, and several different words for grey but not distinct words for orange and pink (I'm ignoring X-iro words which mean "color of X" like momoiro for the color of peaches or oranjiiro for the color of oranges). It is interesting though that (gosai) means "the five colors" -- black, white, red, yellow, and green/blue.

It is interesting to note that in my limited experience is seems that the more civilized and thus artistic a culture becomes, the more words for colors they invent or co-opt.

Oh no...

[the_demiurge]

If language does have such a profound effect on our thought processes, does this mean the Time Cube guy is right, and "Teachers are hired evil word pedants who enslave childish minds to a lifetime stupidity."?

Are we really "educated as a stupid android slave to the evil Word Animal Singularity Brotherhood"?

I'm scared. :-(

But what. . .

[smooth wombat]

if I pass the dutchie on the left-hand side? What then?

Childhood learning...

[hhr]

I wonder if this is like native asians and the letters 'r' and 'l'-- if you don't learn the difference when you are young then your brain will have problems thinking that way.

If so, it would mean that it's not the language that causes you to think differently, but a seperate skill that you also use to speak the language. In this case of the Tarahumara speakers, it's distinquishing green and blue. They never needed to do so, so now they have problems when tested for it.

Conclusions Sound?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

The researchers found that participants responded more quickly when the color of the odd-man-out had a different name than the color of the other squares -- as if the linguistic difference had heightened the perceptual difference -- but this only occurred if the odd-man-out was in the right half of the visual field, and not when it was in the left half. This was the predicted pattern.

The conclusions seem sound. The experiment even proved its aim that only the left half of the brain shows a difference. As the article mentions, the linguistic distinction seems to heighten the left hemisphere's ability to distinguish the actual color distinction. But does this show a fundamental difference in thought processes, or simply a type of learned response.

For example, imagine an experiment whereby you walk down the street wearing a T-shirt with a CCCP logo on it. Most people born after say, 1980 might not even bat an eyelid. Someone who grew up amid the 50's red scare, practicing taking shelter under their school desk, might suddenly find their eye transfixed on the logo, their heart rate increasing, and a sudden urge to duck beneath the nearest school desk.

So does something similar occur when you've been taught your whole life that blue and green are different colors, verses say, being told that green was just a kind of yellowy blue?

Neurolinguistic oversimplification?

[Floody]

I believe this is somewhat of a simplification. It may be applicable in terms of auditory perception and processing, but as everyone knows, language is much more than the sum of individual words.

Neurolinguistic events are examples of associative cascade events. This is illustrated by the classic example: "Don't think of an elephant." Immediately after reading and comprehending the linguistic elements of the sentence, each and every reader of this post made the applicable associative connections resulting in the contemplation (even if minor and short-lived) of one of our long-nosed pachyderm friends. Even if it was understood that the instruction was not to make the association, by the time this level of awareness was achieved, the cascade was already in progress and unstoppable.

The context of such associative cascades (especially more sophisticated varieties) is largely cultural; however the portions of the brain most likely to respond is based on each association in the chain and its relative contextual weight, rather than the phonetics of the original sound itself.

Lyrical forms of linguistics, such as poetry and song, are particularly powerful because they offer a way to rapidly trigger abstract associations not related to logic, speech or visual images.

Sapir Whorf is BS

[lawpoop]

There's no way that Sapir Whorf can be true. If it were, that means that, just off the top of my head, we couldn't lie, entertain theoretical possibilities, hear two sides of the same event, understand that we were misinformed earlier but have correct information now, tell a fictional story, etc.

Stephen Pinker does a good job of debunking Sapir Whorf in _The Language Instinct_. The classic examples of the number of Eskimo words for snow is actually not true -- Inuit language has a lot of suffixes, but there are only a few different root words for snow. English has about as many root words for snow.

The other example was factory workers or something who mistakenly disposed of cigarette butts in 'empty' barrels that were actually full of flammable fumes. Well, the workers weren't fooled by language; there were fooled by invisible fumes. An empty barrel looks exactly like one full of fumes.

Re:Sapir Whorf is BS

[angelatlarge]

I think the strong form of Sapir-Whorf is generally taken to be that - too strong. However, Steven Pinker is not the only authority on the subject, and there are plenty of smart people who think that there is something to the weaker form of this (something like "the categories present in the speaker's native language must be attended to by the speaker"). This would mean that you can, in fact, learn concepts like "schadenfreude" but also if concepts like "schadenfreude" are present in your language you are probably more attuned to them. Which is what the study demonstrates, I think.

This is easier to talk about with more "differing" concepts (rathen than simply presence/absence of a lexical item, such as "schadenfreude", like absolute (north-south) directions versus relative (left-right). This http://www.anthrosource.net/doi/abs/10.1525/jlin.1 993.3.1.3 is a link to an article about a speaker of an absolute direction-language modifying his gestures showing how the boat capsized based on his (the speaker's) position at the time of the telling. The storyteller always used the correct ABSOLUTE gesture showing the flip (say, along the east-west axis): something that's hard (for me, at least) to imagine a speaker of English doing.

This reminds me of a saying...

[vertinox]

"It is easy problem to learn the things we do not know. The harder problem is trying know things that we do not know that we do not know."

Personally, I wonder if I am limited by the English language to thoughts I wish to express. Maybe my mind is a computer, the neurons the cpu, my memories is the hard drive storage, but my language is the OS.

However, what if I have Qbasic for DOS for my speaking language? No matter how powerful my brain is, I can't use this to create say "Doom 4" though expression for the mind. I'd need a specialized C++ compiler that optimized neurons in such a pattern to acheive this.

What if that language doesn't exist yet? Is it possible that my brain could have thoughts and emotions, but can't because I can't use language to express them.

On the bright side, English is a quickly mutating bastard language which seems fairly evolvable but sometimes I wonder if I should learn Japanese, Russian, or German and then end up with a new outlook on life.

And now for something totally different

[softweyr]

I wonder if I should learn Japanese, Russian, or German and then end up with a new outlook on life

Why settle for mundane utility languages? Learn Navajo or Swahili or Inuit, then design a programming language based on the linguistic concepts and world view you've now acquired. A Navajo-based computing language would be interesting, it would perhaps specialize in calculating only that which is actually worth calculating. Of course such a language would completely eliminiate Slashdot from existence.

Distinguish colors in diff. languages

[witte]

Using different languages can make an *enormous* difference in how easy it is for one to distinguish between, for example, blue and green !

Just look at the following Fine Example :

HTML : #0000FF - - - #00FF00
Perl : \0032 - - - \0033
BASIC : Navy - - - Chartreuse


Clearly, hexidecimal notation of HTML is far superior in clarity to all other languages !