What is the Relationship

Between
Language and Thought
 “What is language for?”
• Communication & Private Speech
• “The private uses of language are equally varied and
important, including functions like
• problem-solving
• enhancing social intelligence by rehearsing the thoughts of
others
• memory aids
• focusing attention, etc.
They seem to extend into almost every domain of thought.”
(Chomsky, Fitch and Hauser)
Language and Thought
 Qs regarding the role of language in our
thinking.
• If we grant that we use language (inner or private) for thinking,
how much do we rely on it in our daily life for thinking?
• Are there thoughts that we can only entertain through language?
• Does the specific language we speak influence our thinking? If so,
how?
 Qs regarding the role of language in our
thinking.
• Could learning the lexicon and grammars of one’s language lead
to the development of new concepts? If so, how?
 Cognitive Psychology Experiments
Language Influence on:
• Problem Solving
• Memory and Associations
• Categorization
 Answers:
Symbolic Systems (Language is one) A. 1 only
B. 2 only
• What’s the answer to: C. 3 only
– Twenty three times five hundred seventy-one. D. 2 and 3 only
E. 1, 2, and 3
• How did you solve the math problem?
• Buses 1, 2, and 3 make one trip each day, and they are the only ones
that riders A, B, C, D, E, F, and G take to work.
– Neither E nor G takes bus 1 on a day when B does.
– G does not take bus 2 on a day when D does.
– When A and F take the same bus, it is always bus 3.
– C always takes bus 3.
• Traveling together to work, B, C, and G could take which of the same
buses on a given day?
• How did you solve this problem?
 Baddeley (1986) Slave Systems

Visuospatial Central Phonological

Sketchpad Executive Loop
 Language and Problem Solving
Baddeley, Thomson, & Buchanan (1975)

• Read the list of 5 countries to yourself

• Then try to recall the list
• There are two such lists.
 List 1

Chad, Burma, Greece, Cuba, Malta

 List 2

Czechoslovakia, Somaliland, Nicaragua, Afghanistan,

Yugoslavia
 Which list was easier?
• Our recall is dependent on the number of syllables
we can say quickly (Vallar & Baddeley, 1982).

• Study shows: Verbal rehearsing is a strategy that we

use to maintain things (here names) in active
memory. A list of places with more syllables takes
longer to rehearse than one with fewer syllables.
 Vallar & Baddeley (1986)
• Different Types of Lists:
– 1 Syllable Words:
• “tan, man, sin, hop, wax”
– 2 Syllable Words:
• “market, table, lesser, picket, garden”
• Subjects:
– Read words aloud (as quickly as possible)
– Recall list of words.
 • Reading
Vallar & Baddely (1986) rate has
100 2.5
the same
90 2.3
functional
80 2.1
relation as
70 1.9
% Correct

Reading Rate
%Correct

60 1.7
with
50 1.5
40
respect to
1.3
30 %Correct 1.1
the
20
Reading Rate
0.9
number
10 0.7
of
0 0.5
syllables
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 in the
Number of Syllables
words!
 Summary
Maintaining Information - memory
• Visually encoded information (image) decays at a faster
rate than verbally encoded information. (estimates 1s vs.
2-4s).
• George Miller’s 7+2 estimate for (short term) memory
span is likely the result of using verbal encoding rather
than visually based encoding.
• The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some
Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information
 Cognitive Psychology Experiments
Language Influence on:
• Problem Solving
• Memory and Associations
• Categorization
 Loftus & Loftus (1980)
• An Interesting Read:
– Loftus, E. & Loftus, L. (1980). On the Permanence of
Stored Information in the Human Brain. American
Psychologist, 35, pp. 409-420.
• Memories are not permanent. Thus, some memories are
unrecoverable.
• Memories can be “over-written” or “altered”.
 Carmichael, Hogan, & Walter (1932)

• Exercise:
– You will see a series of pictures
– Remember what you see
– You will be asked to draw what you see after
seeing the series
 Group 1

Picture 1: Eyeglasses
 Group 1

Picture 2: Hourglass
 Group 1

Picture 3: Seven
Group 1

Picture 4: Gun
 Group 1
• Draw the Items
 Group 2

Picture 1: Dumbbell
 Group 2

Picture 2: Table
 Group 2

Picture 3: Four
Group 2

Picture 4: Broom
 Group 2
• Draw the Items
Elizabeth Loftus & Retrospective Bias
Elizabeth Loftus & Retrospective Bias
Exp. 1: How fast was the car going?
 Elizabeth Loftus & Retrospective Bias
Exp. 2 (1 week later): Was there any broken glass?
Correct answer should be “NO”
 Summary
• Memory is fallible.
• Memory of language used could influence a person’s
memory.
– Language used by another person
– Language used by oneself
 Marian & Neisser (2000)
Study:
• Bilingual Cornell College Students emigrated from Russia when
there were around 14 y.o. (average)
• Participants told: You are participating in a study that is looking
at story-telling in different languages. Tell us brief stories of
events in your life.
Result:
• Interviewed in English:
– Recalled more events in U.S.
• Interviewed in Russian:
– Recalled more events in Russian.
Associations
 Associations

“jagged”
“intricate”
El (fem)
Der (masc)
“key” “key”

Spanish
German
German Spanish German Spanish
Heavy Golden Beautiful Big
Jagged Intricate Elegant Dangerous
Metal Little Fragile Long
Serrated Lovely Peaceful Strong
useful Shiny Pretty Sturdy
Slender Towering
 Elaborateness of Processing
(Anderson)
• Degree of inter-connectivity determines strength of memory
traces.
• Craik & Tulving Results:
– Connection to other knowledge.
• Koler’s Results:
– Connection to EPISODIC Memories.
English:
“This is an apple. It is tasty.”

German:
“This is an apple. He is tasty.”

Spanish:
“This is an apple. She is tasty.”
 Memory task
• Used 24 object names (e.g., “apple”) that had
opposite grammatical genders in Spanish and
German (half masculine, half feminine)
• Spanish and German speakers were asked to
perform in a memory task in English to avoid making
them think explicitly about grammatical gender
German: der Apfel (m)

Spanish: la manzana (f)

• Apple – Patrick
• Key – Erica
• Cat – George
 Cognitive Psychology Experiments
Language Influence on:
• Problem Solving
• Memory and Associations
• Categorization
 Robert Leeper (1935) Group 3
Group 1 Group 2 (no prior picture)

Describe this
picture:

Group 3
Group 1: Group 2
65% young woman
94% old woman 100% young woman

Original image modified to emphasise one of the

readings; additional descriptions or word cues given.
Example of prior information influencing how you
construe the task.
 Bulgelski & Alampay (1961)
Series 1: Animal pictures

Ambiguous
image

Series 2: People pictures

Exercise:
You will see a series of pictures
Name the objects you see
 Bulgelski & Alampay (1961)
Example of prior information influencing how you construe the task.

Rat

Man
 Language Influence on Categorization
• Does the way our language carves up the world influence how
we categorize something as belonging or not belonging to a
particular category?
 Path vs. Manner Languages
(Malt et al, Papafragou et al)

• Same-different judgments (e.g., which one does not belong?)

• Languages encode preferentially either manner (English, German,
Russian) or path in the verbs (Greek, Turkish, Japanese, French);
languages can have the other kind of verbs as well (exit, enter,
depart, arrive, come, go etc.)
• English skip, run, hop, jog (manner), and path in a variety of other
devices such as particles (out), adpositions (into the room), verb
affixes etc.
Expect M languages to group 1 and 3 together and
P languages to group 1 and 2

M: carry, P: exit M: carry, P: enter M: drag, P: exit

Finding: No effect of language

 English vs. Korean
(Bowerman & Choi, McDonough et al)
• Many experiments in the literature consists of same-different
judgments (e.g., which one does not belong?)
• Putting in vs putting on; Korean –kkita marks complementary, tight-fit,
container relationship (English 1 and 2 grouped, Korean 2 and 3)

#1 #2 #3
Finding: Effect of Language in the case of tight/loose vs.
containment/support.
English, Black
circles indicate the
differences
between putting in
and putting on.
Korean, red circle,
partitions the
relationships
differently.
• Across different comparisons, sometimes experimenters
find effect of language, sometimes not.
• That is, speakers of languages differ in how they categorize
 Analogy to Phoneme Categorical Perception
• Language influences saliency of concepts
It seems fairly self-evident that the language one happens to speak
affords, or conversely makes less accessible, certain complex
concepts. (Levinson, p. 33)
• Analogy drawn to phoneme categorical perception
-Choi et al. have shown that 9-month-old infants have equal facility to
make English versus Korean spatial distinctions, while by 18 months
they are tuned into the local language-specific distinctions.
-By the time we reach adulthood, just as we find alien language
distinctions hard to hear, so English-speaking adults have lost the
ability to make Korean distinctions even in nonlinguistic implicit
categorization. (Levinson, p. 27)
 Benjamin Lee Whorf
Yale: Research
Fire First Paper
Born Fellowships 1941
Prevention Nahuatl
Winthrop, Lecturer Died
Engineer Aztec
MA at 44.

1897 1907 1917 1927 1937 1947

MIT
Interest in 1956
Chem. E.
Linguistics Yale
E. Sapir

Fieldwork
Arizona –
Modern
Nahuatl
 WHORF on English versus Hopi
• We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The
categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we
do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the
contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions
which has to be organized by our minds -- and this means largely by the
linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into
concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are
parties to an agreement to organize it in this way -- an agreement that
holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the pattern of
our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one,
BUT ITS TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY: we cannot talk at all
except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which
the agreement decrees. --- "Science and Linguistics (c.a. 1940).
 Sapir (Whorf’s Teacher) on Linguistic
Determinism
• Language is a guide to "social reality." Though language is not ordinarily thought
of as of essential interest to the students of social science, it powerfully
conditions all our thinking about social problems and processes. Human beings
do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity
as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular
language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is
quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use
of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific
problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the "real
world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the
group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as
representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live
are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.
• Sapir, Language 1929
 Franz Boas (Sapir’s Teacher) on
Linguistic Determinism
• ... The obligatory grammatical aspects of a language determines
those aspects of experience that must be expressed... When we say
"The man killed the bull" we understand that a definite single man in
the past killed a definite single bull. We cannot express this
experience in which a way that we remain in doubt whether a definite
or indefinite person or bull, one or more persons or bulls, the present
or past time are meant. We have to choose between aspects and one
or the other must be chosen. The obligatory aspects are expressed by
means of grammatical devices (1938:132). The aspects chosen in
different groups of languages vary fundamentally.
 Differences between these three?
• Boas: “… it determines those aspects of experience that must
be expressed…” (naming)
• Sapir: Language is a guide to "social reality."
• Whorf: We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native
languages.
• Sometimes called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
 What Is Linguistic Determinism?
• Grammatical features like gender (none to ~20), tense (tenseless to
several), spatial relationships (geocentric vs egocentric), manner vs.
path attributes of verbs, counting systems (one-many or more
elaborated) vary across languages.
• Do these differences also signal differences in how the speakers think?
Are thought and language identical?
• Recall, the gender test in Spanish and German and the associations
made.
• Translations are possible (schadenfreude ~pleasure derived by
someone from another person's misfortune; glasnost ~the policy or
practice of more open consultative government and wider
dissemination of information, Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985).
• Politically correct terms (handicapped – differently-abled –
disability; he-she-s/he-one-they; deaf – hearing-impaired;
poor-underprivileged-disadvantaged; retarded – mentally
challenged) change language to change attitudes. However,
the unpleasant connotations sooner or later attach
themselves to the new coinages
• Piraha debate (Peter Gordon and Dan Everett) about
counting
 Does language affect thought?
FICTION --- NEWSPEAK:
secret police  "Ministry of Love"
Ministry of War  "Ministry of Peace"
“free” (only used in statements like "This dog is free from lice.")
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of
thought?… Has it ever occurred to your, Winston, that by the year 2050, at
the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could
understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole
climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we
understand it now. (Orwell, 1984)
Newspeak is a controlled language, of restricted grammar and limited
vocabulary, a linguistic design meant to limit the freedom of thought—
personal identity, self-expression, free will.
 Does language affect thought?

Some people seem to think not:

Chomsky (1984):
“The claim that we’re making about primitive notions is that
if data were presented in such a way that these primitives
couldn’t be applied to it directly, prelinguistically, before you
have a grammar, then language couldn’t be learnt… We
have to assume that there are some prelinguistic notions
that can pick out pieces of the world, say elements of this
meaning and this sound.”
 Does language affect thought?
“There is no scientific evidence that languages dramatically affect
their speakers’ way of thinking.... The idea that language shapes
thinking seemed plausible when scientists were in the dark about
how thinking works or even how to study it. Now that cognitive
scientists know how to think about thinking, there is less of a
temptation to equate it with language....”
- Steven Pinker (1994)
“Does language have a dramatic effect on thought in some other
way than through communication? Probably not.”
- Bloom & Keil (2001)
 Whorf’s Argument
(Era Before Experiments)

• The argument:
– Languages vary in the concepts they
express/encode
– Thought is dependent on language
– Thus speakers of different languages think
differently.
• The evidence: linguistic variation
 Whorf’s Questions
• Are our concepts of time, space and matter given in substantially
the same form by experience to all people (universal), or are they
in part (linguistically/culturally) conditioned by the structure of
particular languages?
• Are there traceable affinities between cultural and behavioural
norms and large scale linguistic patterns?
• Whorf attempted to provide examples of language differences
and not simply make the claim.
• Whorf actually claimed that some languages (Hopi for example)
may be superior to European languages because of the way their
language categorized the world.
 Hopi vs SAE
• By comparison with many American languages, the
formal systematization of ideas in English, German,
French or Italian seems poor and jejune. Why, for
instance, do we not, like the Hopi, use a different
way of expressing the relation of channel of
sensation (seeing) to result in consciousness, as
between 'I see that it is red' and 'I see that it is
new?‘…
 Contd…
• We fuse the two quite different types of relationships into a
vague sort of connection expressed by 'that', whereas the Hopi
indicates that in the first case seeing presents a sensation 'red',
and in the second that seeing presents unspecified evidence from
which is drawn the inference of newness. If we change the form
to 'I hear that it is red' or 'I hear that it is new,' we European
speakers still cling to our lame 'that', but the Hopi now uses still
another relater and makes no distinction between 'red' and 'new'
since, in either case, the significant presentation to consciousness
is that of a verbal report, and neither a sensation per se nor
inferential evidence.
• Does the Hopi language show here a higher plane of
thinking, a more rational analysis of situations, than our
vaunted English? Of course it does. In this field and in
various others, English compared to Hopi is like a bludgeon
compared to a rapier. We even have to think and boggle
over the question for some time, or have it explained to us,
before we can see the difference in the relationships
expressed by 'that' in the above examples, whereas the Hopi
discriminates these relationships with effortless ease, for the
forms of his speech have accustomed him to do so.
--- Whorf, Language Thought and Reality, p140
 Habitual Thought
• By "habitual thought" and "thought world" I mean more than
simply language, i.e., than the linguistic patterns themselves. I
include all the analogical and suggestive value of the patterns
(e.g., our "imaginary space and its distant implications), and all
the give-and-take between language and the culture as a
whole, wherein is a vast amount that is not linguistic but yet
shows the shaping influence of language. In brief, this
"thought world" is the microcosm that each man carries about
within himself, by which he measure and understands what he
can of the macrocosm.
 Time
• English tense categories and nouns for periods of time – discrete objects
(hour, day etc.) – reinforce the idea that time is linear and segmental
(although time is ephemeral and cyclical). English speakers think of
themselves as a point with time moving indefinitely towards the past and
future (ten men and ten days are the same linguistically but not perceptually)
• Hopi, time is not divided into units that are count nouns, but are expressed
adverbially; thus ten days are not a collection of different days but as a
successive appearance of the same cycle with a potential for the past and
the future within the cycle. Hopi verb encodes instead whether an
experience is in the objective realm (manifest experience) or in the
subjective realm (unmanifest experience)
• Whorf argues that this is why western society is concerned with exact dates
and records (calendars and diaries) while the Hopi do not track time in this
way.
 Spatial Frames of Reference
(how one talks about the directions and locations of objects in space…)

Figure Reference Object

• “Where is the girl?”

– Need a Ground/Reference Object
– And a relation between Figure and
Ground/Reference Object
(e.g., a coordinate system = Frame of Reference).
 Frames of Reference
(how one talks about the directions and locations of objects in space…)

• “Where is the girl?”

– The girl is to the south of the umbrella. Reference Object
Figure
(GEOCENTRIC FRAME OF
REFERENCE)
– The girl is to the left of the umbrella.
(EGOCENTRIC FRAME OF
REFERENCE)
– The girl is at the umbrella’s
front/downward side.
(INTRINSIC FRAME OF REFERENCE)
 Crosslinguistic Variations
(Brown & Levinson, 1993; Pederson et al., 1998; Majid et al., 2004, etc.)
• English
– Egocentric preference uphill
• “left” and “right”
• Tzeltal Mayan (spoken in Tenejapa,
Mexico)
– Geocentric preference downhill crosshill
• alan “downhill” (N)
• aj’kol “uphill” (S)
• jejch “crosshill” (EW)
– Lexical Gap: No projective left or right!
How do Tzeltal speakers tend to talk about
space?
Frequently make statements that are the spatial
equivalent of, “hand me the spoon that is to the
northeast of the cup.”
Odd for an English speaker
Claims about aspects of thought affected by
linguistic frames of reference
• Gestural depiction of events during story-telling (e.g.,
Haviland, 1993)
• Memory for real-life events (Levinson, 1997)
• Dead-reckoning and navigational abilities (Levinson, 1996)
Tenejapans (Mayans) show an interesting tendency to confuse
left-right inversions or mirror-images (i.e., reflections across the
apparent vertical axis), even when visually presented
simultaneously, which seems related to their absence of ‘left’
and ‘right’ terms, and the absence of related asymmetries in their
material culture.
(Levinson, 1996 in Gumperz & Levinson: 182)
 Tenejapans maintain a constant sense of absolute
orientation, presumably by running a continuous
background computation of egocentric heading with
respect to abstract bearings, integrating multiple internal
and external cues to achieve this.
Levinson, Kita, Haun, & Rasch (2002) p. 173
I am here
Experimental Paradigm – ANIMALS-IN-A-ROW Task
(Bird’s Eye View) Rotation Experiment

Step 1: Ss memorize items Step 2: Ss rotated

north side)
(right side,

Subject
Table 1 Table 2 Table 1 Table 2

Step 3: Ss recreate “same” as Table 1. At least 2 possible solutions.

Step 3 geocentric tendency Step 3 egocentric tendency
(north side)

(north side)

(right side)

(right side)
Table 1 Table 2 Table 1 Table 2
• Similar experiment
– Which direction does the arrow on left point?
– Turn 180°.
– Which arrow points same direction as original arrow?

• Results
– English speakers
• “consistently choose arrow B”
– Tzeltal speakers
• “consistently choose arrow A”
 Other studies
• Colour
• Number
• False beliefs
 Problems?
• Suppose it is true that Eskimos
make fine discriminations of
snow, and Tahitians do not.
• Eskimos make fine snow
discriminations BECAUSE they
have lots of snow words.
OR
• Eskimos make fine snow
discriminations AND SO they
have lots of snow words.
• Recall manner-path verbs
 Conclusions?
• Tentative results in favor of:
– Language as a tool for reasoning/problem-solving
– Language as something that forces you to attend to
certain aspects of the world and practice using them
• Spanish and German gender
• Psycholinguistic experiments on memory, recall and
category
– All thought is not mediated by language – perceptions,
sensations, language-deprivation, animals, babies