Psychology - Language and Thought

• Language and thought

  Relationship between language and the concepts it represents
• Do I know what an object or idea is if I don't have the word for it?


  Or can I use a word properly without knowing the concept it's based on?
• Schema

  Mental package of information we have about concepts, built from experience
• Piaget's stages of language development

  1. Sensory/motor stage

  2. Pre-operational stage

  3. Concrete operational stage

  4. Formal operational stage
• Piaget's theory


  Use of language is only possible for children when they've reached a certain stage of cognitive development
• Piaget's theory has face validity but lacks experimental evidence
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis


  To be able to think about a concept, we need to be able to express it in words
• Linguistic determinism

  The structure of our language shapes how we think
• Words for objects in different cultures

  • 9 words for coconut in Solomon Islands
  • 92 words for rice in Philippines
  • Over 1000 words for snow in Inuit language
• Language differences

  Influence perception of reality
• Research on event recall

  • English speakers more likely to remember who broke the vase
  • Spanish speakers more likely to recall it being an accident
• Research on color perception

  • Ancient Greeks had no word for blue
  • Zuni people had difficulty distinguishing orange and yellow
  • Russian speakers perceive shades of blue faster than English speakers
• Most languages develop the same color words in a set order, suggesting universal color perception
• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

  • Can explain cognitive underperformance of poorer students due to lack of complex vocabulary
  • Practical differences between most languages are limited, e.g. descriptive words in English can add meaning