Hello and welcome back to Cognitive Psychology Chat!

I’m your host Alec and in this episode on

language and cognition, we’ll discuss the question of whether the language that we speak shapes
the way we think. Now, since there’re over 6,700 languages in the world (Comrie, 2017), that
question can also be reframed as “Do people speaking different languages think and see the world in
different ways?”, or “Does learning a new language come with adopting a new way of thinking as
well?”. In posing these questions, there’s this notion that different languages may shape how we
differently perceive our world, which, in turn, shapes how we differently interact with it. Thus
understandably, this is a topic of many implications that has garnered lots of interest.

In the 20th century, the influential Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was introduced and advanced. This term is
considered a misnomer, as Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf did not work together and the
idea was never put forward as a hypothesis. And while no distinction was originally made by the two
authors, two themes can be identified from their works, which gave rise to two theories branching
off the hypothesis: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity (Hill & Mannheim, 1992; Kay &
Kempton, 1984). The strong version, known as linguistic determinism, argues that the language we
speak constraint the way we think and that if a language doesn’t have a word for a concept,
speakers of that language would not be able to understand it. Meanwhile, its weak counterpart,
linguistic relativity, proposes that language has some influence on our thinking but does not strictly
constraint it. Linguistic determinism is controversial and has received sizable criticism. One of its
critics, linguist Guy Deutscher, stated that there has never been any convincing evidence for such
restrictive influence of the mother-tongue and that thousands of counter examples can be found if
we’re willing to look (Deutscher, 2010). ‘say, have you ever tried to explain a feeling you have but
couldn’t put it into words? Or try to find a word to describe something but can’t seem to find the
right one even though you’ve googled multiple synonyms similar to what you’re thinking of? To me
these are pretty solid evidence that language isn’t the be-all end-all for our thoughts. However, on
the other hand, most research into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has focused on languagistic relativity
and come into much interesting evidence.

Let’s start with perhaps the most intriguing of it all: how language shapes the perception of space
and time (Boroditsky & Gaby, 2010). Now, I want you to try and point out where the north-east is.
Are you confident in your answer? How long did it take you? The Pormpuraawans aboriginal
community in Australia can tell you immediately the accurate direction of the north-east, as easily as
if you asked them “What is 1+1?”. Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky and and Alice Gaby found that
this ability lies in a feature of their language, which is the Kuuk Thaayorre. In this language, speakers
are required to use absolute direction terms like north, south, east, west instead of relative spatial
term like left and right (where we use our body as the reference point). They say things like “There’s
a spider crawling up my north-west leg” or “Move that table over to the north-northwest a little bit”.
For “hello”, one says “Where are you going?” and an appropriate reply would be “A long way to the
south-south east”. Thus, if you don’t know which way is which, you literally can’t get past hello. This
geocentric system requires them to always stay oriented in space which seems extraordinary as a
human feat to those speaking languages that do not require it, like English! But how is this related to
the concept of time? Let’s do another task. Imagine that you’re sitting at a table and I give you some
photos of a person at different ages, one showing them as a child, another as a teenager and so on.
Now arrange these photos in the order of time. How would you do it? Boroditsky and Gaby
conducted that test and found that Americans arranged the photos horizontally going from left to
right so that’s how they conceptualize time. The Pormpuraawans’ arrangements, instead, flow from
left to right when one’s facing south, right to left when one’s north, toward the body when one’s
facing east, and away from the body when one’s facing west. What is going on here? We cannot see,
touch, or smell time. Therefore, to represent time, we heavily rely on space and spatial words (like
forward, back, long, short in English). The Pormpuraawans, with their geocentric orientation,
conceptualize time flow with the sun, going from east to west. Now that makes perfect logical sense!
It’s pretty egocentric of us to think time chases us around every time we turn our body.

Another interesting case is in color perception (Winawer et al., 2007). Some languages have a lot of
words for colors, some only have a couple of words, light and dark and languages differ between
where they put boundaries for different colors. Jonathan Winawer and colleagues conducted a study
comparing Russian and English speakers in their perception of the color blue. In English we only have
one word for different shades of blue but in Russian, these are categorically different, goluboy is
light blue and sinyi is dark blue. Russian speakers therefore must distinguish between these shades
in their conversations. In a task where participants were required to match a color to one among a
triad presented, Russians were quicker than English speakers in discriminating colors that span the
light/dark blue boundary as they are essentially different colors. What I think is the most fascinating
in this test is that such advantage disappeared when Russians had to silently rehearse digits strings
during the task as a form of verbal interference. Meanwhile, it did not disappear when they were in
the spatial-interference condition, having to maintain a spatial pattern in their memory. This is a
really solid evidence for Whorfanism’s causality: the Russian language causes the difference in blue
perception and when it’s interfered with, the difference disappeared.

On the topic of causality, it’s helpful to also look at this question “Does a person change the way
they think after learning a new language?” There is evidence for the affirmative. For example, the
Hungarian language doesn’t have grammatical gender while Spanish does. In a research by Elena
Kurinski and colleagues (Kurinski et al., 2016), Hungarians started to assign voices to pictured objects
with genders in accordant to Spanish’s grammar after 10 weeks of taking an introductory Spanish
course. For example, a book is assigned a male voice as it is masculine in Spanish, el libro.
Participants did not show this tendency at the beginning. Again, this is evidence that language plays
a causal role: teach someone a different way to speak and they’ll think differently.

In conclusion, there are two versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. While the strong version,
linguistic determinism, may be excessive in stating that language strictly constraint our thoughts,
there is plenty intriguing evidence for its weak counterpart, linguistic relativity, which states that
language influences our thoughts to some extent. We’ve covered examples in the concept of space
and time, color perception, as well as grammatical gender. We also discussed how the causal
direction is supported by research. Lastly, I want to leave you with this quote from Noam Chomsky in
his book “Language and Mind”: “When we study” human language, we are approaching what some
might call the “human essence,” the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique
to man.”. If we take this idea and that there are so many different languages, then each of these
languages is shaping different human essence, different ways of being human, being in the world
and engaging with it.

This is the end of this week’s episode. I’m Alec and I’ll see you next time on Cognitive Psychology
Chat!

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/11/09/guy-deutscher-on-%e2%80%98through-the-
language-glass%e2%80%99/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism#cite_note-11
 References

Boroditsky, L., & Gaby, A. (2010). Remembrances of Times East: Absolute Spatial

Representations of Time in an Australian Aboriginal Community. Psychological

science, 21(11), 1635-1639. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797610386621

Comrie, B. (2017). Languages of the world. The handbook of linguistics, 21-38.

Deutscher, G. (2010). Through the language glass: Why the world looks different in other

languages. Metropolitan books.

Hill, J. H., & Mannheim, B. (1992). Language and World View. Annual Review of

Anthropology, 21(1), 381-404. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.an.21.100192.002121

Kay, P., & Kempton, W. (1984). What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? American

anthropologist, 86(1), 65-79. https://doi.org/10.1525/aa.1984.86.1.02a00050

Kurinski, E., Jambor, E., & Sera, M. D. (2016). Spanish grammatical gender: Its effects on

categorization in native Hungarian speakers. The international journal of bilingualism

: cross-disciplinary, cross-linguistic studies of language behavior, 20(1), 76-93.

https://doi.org/10.1177/1367006915576833

Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007).

Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, 104(19), 7780-7785.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0701644104