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".

Huhu almost

[stonecypher]

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

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.