Language, Thought and Reality
Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf
The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of the languages we speak.
@appassionato@bookstodon@linguistics Well, that's a bit too much of hype, because there is very little evidence that Whorf's basic thesis is relevant in the real world. The only artefact I am aware of is a study on colour perception that is different for speakers of languages like Russian that have two words for #blue (denoting #azure and #indigo as basic colours).
@fiee@jk@appassionato We can recognise differences without naming things, I think.
Speaking English, I partition my vowel space in a particular way. Speaking German, I have a different way. Ok, we have ways of writing down those differences, so we have named the sounds. But there was a time before writing, and we did it then, too.
I can't help wondering if using the same my for 'my wife' and 'my boot' has an effect.
The research paper should be rerun with people whose first and second languages are the opposite pairing. To fnd if the effect is simply 'thinking in a second language'
@fay@appassionato@jk@bookstodon@linguistics Same for Scottish Gaelic - there are 2 sets of color words. The artificial colors correspond to Germanic colors, but the natural colors divide the color spectrum differently. Lightness/Saturation is paying a role here too. "glas" can mean blue, green or grey, gorm is blue or green etc.
@jk@appassionato@bookstodon@linguistics What this evidence for linguistic relativity actually shows is how speakers name things, not how they percieve things: two related objects may have different names in one language, but only one in another; but if you present both things to the speakers at the same time, they both will agree that the things are different.
This wouldn't be the case if language (that is, names) were to influence your perception of the world.
@LupinoArts@jk@appassionato@bookstodon@linguistics
Yeah, it'd be bold to claim that you could show the effect of language on perception separately from the effect of language on how the experimental subjects are instructed and how their responses are interpreted.
@petealexharris@jk@appassionato@bookstodon@linguistics not quite sure where you're getting at... That linguistic relativism is in itself unfalsifiable because there is no way to conduct any experiments without influencing the results? That would make it entirely worthless as a scientific hypothesis...
Approximately that, but I'm not saying it's absolutely worthless, just that if that problem isn't addressed carefully in the experimental design it badly weakens any claimed results.
But also, the stronger linguistic relativism was, the less the research articles themselves could be understood to mean anything except within the paradigm of the researcher's own language, so they don't have any objective applicability.
@LupinoArts@jk@appassionato@bookstodon@linguistics there's research (ref Lea Boroditsky) that people speaking languages that have distinct words for shades of blue (Russian, Italian) are better at distinguishing the actual shades of blue
@mapto@jk@appassionato@linguistics Just read this paper: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/245631970_Effects_of_language_on_color_discriminability Interesting findings, but i assume the effects could also be explained by priming: If you have a more differentiated lexicon for categories, you are faster at sorting elements into those categories, but this does not necessarily mean that you percieve those elements differently. I wonder, how the results would look if they compared, say, artists against non-artists.
@LupinoArts@mapto@appassionato@linguistics It is not as easy as that. A proper experiment on this (like the one by Maier and Abdel Rahman I am alluding to) does not require the probands to name the colour. Instead, shapes in different shades of blue are presented and the task is to recognise the SHAPE of the objects. Due to the short reaction time some objects are missed by the test persons. 1/2
@LupinoArts@mapto@appassionato@linguistics The missing rate is lower for native speakers of Greek or Russian: They recognise some more of the shapes if the shades of blue cross the azure-indigo line in their native languages.
As a bonus: The difference vanishes when the probands have to memorise a sequence of number over the experiment, indicating that language processing is involved in the effect. 2/2
"We conclude that linguistic enhancement of color contrasts provides targets with a head start in accessing visual consciousness. Our native language is thus one of the forces that determine what we consciously perceive."
@appassionato@mapto@jk@linguistics It's the same as with the other paper: All they show is that a broader lexicon improves a subject's ability to put things into categories, but I don't quite get how that should be an argument for linguistic relativism (let alone determinism, as the wording in your quotation suggests): all those experiments say something about linguistic processing, but not (necessarily) about general world perception.
@LupinoArts@appassionato@mapto@linguistics First, it is not just a broader lexicon but a lexical difference in the native language (L1) that is significant here, and the putting things into categories is quite automated here. "World perception" sounds very big here (a bit like German Weltanschauung), but the authors of the study see a measurable effect on a little bit of perception (here: shades of "blue").
@LupinoArts@mapto@jk@appassionato@linguistics
But wouldn't the fact that language categorisations might tend to 'prime' perceptions and interactions be the point.?
I don't 'buy' strong linguistic determinism, but the priming effect of language would surely be exactly what you'd expect if a weaker linguistic influence was a reality. The question then becomes what kind of effects and influence ...
@pneumaculturist@mapto@jk@appassionato@linguistics well, priming influences how quickly information is accessed during processing. It has not per se something to do with how we percieve the world around us as linguistic relativism would claim.
@LupinoArts@pneumaculturist@mapto@appassionato@linguistics But "priming" is, as I understand that term from psycholinguistics, something different, it is the effect of a stimulus that happens relatively shortly before the experiment. Like evoking a semantic frame in linguistics.
@jk@pneumaculturist@mapto@appassionato@linguistics It's been a while and i might be wrong. My line of thinking was that if you see a color patch, the name for that category activates and naming the category goes faster. If the colour borders two different categories for one speaker, activation for both is weaker, while for a speaker that has another category in that area of the spectrum, the activation for that category is stronger and that leads to quicker reaction times.
@appassionato@bookstodon I mean, we interpret the world around us based on an internal model. So HOW that model is build and maintained will always impact out interpretation.
Some of that is linguistic. Of course, not entirely. But our language model will impact our world model, to an extent.
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