MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences - Cryptome

John Lucy, an anthropologist, has written about language
differences associated with perceptual differences. For
example, speakers of languages with different basic color
vocabularies might sort nonprimary colors (e.g., turquoise,
chartreuse) in slightly different ways. But such subtle
effects were hardly what Sapir and Whorf had in mind when
they wrote about how language might be related to, or might
even shape, its speakers’ worldview (e.g., time, causality,
ontological categories).
One notable exception is the psychologist Alfred
Bloom’s intriguing claim that the lack of a distinct counterfactual
marker in the Chinese language might make it difficult
for Chinese speakers to think counterfactually—that is,
to think hypothetically about what is not true (e.g., If Plato
had been able to read Chinese, he could have . . .). Upon
close scrutiny, however, Chinese speakers’ purported difficulty
in understanding Bloom’s counterfactual stories disappeared
when researchers such as Terry Au and Lisa Liu
rewrote those stories in idiomatic Chinese with proper counterfactual
markers. With 20/20 hindsight, perhaps we should
have realized that Bloom’s initial finding had to be too fascinating
to be true. Note that when we feel lucky and realize
that things could have turned out badly but didn’t, or when
we regret having done something and wish that we had
acted differently, we have to think counterfactually. How
can something so fundamental and pervasive in human
thinking be difficult in any human language?
Despite early disappointing efforts to uncover evidence
for language shaping thought, a “Whorfian Renaissance”
seems to be in the making. For instance, the anthropologist
Stephen Levinson has reported interesting variations in spatial
language across cultures (see LANGUAGE AND CUL-
TURE). However, how each language carves up space seems
to be principled—influenced by the direction of gravity
(e.g., up, down), human perception (e.g., near, far, front,
back) and so forth—rather than random or arbitrary. Moreover,
there is as yet no evidence for fundamental differences
in spatial cognition associated with linguistic variations. For
example, unlike some Papuan languages, English has no
simple word meaning “that far away up there.” Are English
speakers less capable than Papuan speakers to construe such
a location? Probably not. While the jury is still out for the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, it is probably safe to say that
important aspects of our worldview are unlikely to be at the
mercy of arbitrary aspects of our language.
How about the other way around? By virtue of being
human, we tend to perceive, organize, and reason about the
world in certain ways. Do languages build upon our perceptual
categories and conceptual organization? Consider color perception.
Four-month-old babies prefer looking at primary colors
(red, blue, green, yellow) to colors near the boundaries of
primary colors; toddlers can identify primary colors better than
nonprimary ones. Interestingly, anthropologists Brent Berlin
and Paul Kay found that, if a language has fewer than five
basic color words, it would include red, blue, green, and yellow
(in addition to black and white). Nonprimary colors such
as brown, pink, orange, and purple are encoded only in languages
that have encoded the four primary colors (see COLOR
CATEGORIZATION). Perceptual salience, then, seems to shape
the encoding of color words rather than the other way around.
Language and Thought 445
Our cognition also seems to shape our language. For
instance, when asked in their native language “Paul amazes
Mary. Why?” and “Paul admires Mary. Why?”, the psychologist
Roger Brown found that both Chinese and English
speakers tended to talk about something amazing about Paul
and something admirable about Mary. Note that in English,
“amazing” and “admirable”—rather than “amazable” and
“admiring”—are entrenched adjectives for describing people’s
disposition. These cognitive causal schemas, then,
might be a universal and may have influenced the derivation
of dispositional adjectives in English, rather than the other
way around.
One more central issue in the study of language and
thought: Are our abilities to learn and use language part of
our general intelligence? Or, are they subserved by a special
“language faculty”? Recent findings on language-specific
impairments (i.e., language delay or disorder experienced
by children who are not hearing or cognitively impaired)
and Williams syndrome (i.e., extreme mental retardation
with almost intact language abilities) suggest that cognition
and language can be decoupled (see LANGUAGE IMPAIR-
MENT, DEVELOPMENTAL). In short, although language and
thought might be quite modular (see also MODULARITY OF
MIND), there is some evidence for our cognition and perception
shaping the evolution of our language. Evidence for
influence in the opposite direction, however, seems more
elusive.
See also CATEGORIZATION; IMAGERY; MODULARITY AND
LANGUAGE; NATIVISM; VYGOTSKY
—Terry Au
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