Week 9 - Language and thought

• languages differ through sound structure, melody and rhythm, vocab and grammar
• sapir-whorf hypothesis believes the structure of a persons language influences the manner in which they perceive and understand the world meaning different speakers of different languages perceive the world differently
• language may influence thought in preverbal infants due to language learning beginning in utero, infants recognising their mothers tongue at birth and recognise words before able to speak
• categorisation is the ability to group distinct objects into classes based on shared features and functions
• language provides a tool to express categories, communicate about them and teach them to others
• just because people talk differently doesn't mean they have to think differently. SW didnt conduct systematic experimental work to test their hypothesis.
• psychologists 50 years later put SW ideas to an empirical test and found specific languages dont determine how people think but may influence it
• A colour classification task judging whether two colours were the same or different was used to see if language shaped thought. English speakers were rubbish at this but russian speakers were better due to the linguistic distinctions helping them to discriminate between colours. Winawer et al (2007)
• When babies are presented with tones across each example no categorisation however with words there is categorisation
• ferry, 2010 showed babies different kinds of dinos in familiarisation and then at test they can contrast the dinosaur with a fish - they prefer the new dinosaur as they group it into the same category
• Two familiarisation conditions included words and tone sequence
• shown in the 4mo that they can pick up on the same word but not the same tone
• This pattern with tone and words reverses in younger 3 month year olds where they are able to distinguish with tone but not words
• 3mo infants attracted to familiar objects 4mo attracted to novel objects
• upon hearing novel words infants begin to look for commonalities between objects (Althaus and Plunkett, 2016)
• a principled link - sufficiently constrained to pick out linguistic signals (not tones) sufficiently powerful to promote abstraction
• language helps young children to integrate different spatial reference frames
• Two ways of encoding are relative and absolute
• relative (to the speaker) involves how the cat is on MY right
• Absolute is in terms of cardinal directions and involves the cat being north of an objective place such as a car
• spatial reconstruction task involved participants being shown three animals then asked to memorise them. After a short delay they are spun round and asked to recreate the array on another table
• Shown that dutch speakers preserve the left right ordering (relative) whereas tzeltal speakers preserve the north-south ordering (absolute)
• This shows spatial arrays are memorised using an orientation coding system prevalent in the language they speak showing language does influence thought to some extent
• By 8 years of age specific languages seem to have a strong influence on how children remember spatial orientation with dutch being relative and namibia absolute (Haun, 2011)
• symbolic number representation depends on language
• symbolic number systems support: precise number representations and recording number
• different languages use different number naming systems
• number systems of certain languages do not have deep effect on early maths however number systems in chinese appear to be easier to learn then english
• children learning number words seem to go through the same stages of number word knowledge across different languages and cultures
• waxman, 1995 showed an infant a new object from the same category and a novel one after presenting different animals together. Infant looks longer at the novel one showing that they can categorise from 9-12 months and focus on the object outside of the category
• it was only when words were used to the infant categorisation was able to occur whereas when no words or tones were used no categorisation was made showing language shapes thought
• at 12 months when the categories were presented in silence there was no categorisation and they couldnt distinguish between the objects (waxman, 1995)
• when the categories were presented with words there was a preference shown for the novel object indicating that words helped them to create the category (language shapes thought)
• tones were then used to check if it was specific to language that it helped categorisation and it was found tones did not help categorisation supporting language being unique
• during familiarisation language is irrelevant as they always look equally whether there is language or not.
• By 12 months they are able to use words to discover new categories and group things together. This is a threshold of producing language and principle link between language and categorisation