PSY 3136 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Collateral Damage, Numerical Cognition, Newspeak
28 Nov 2016
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Lecture # 15
March 16 2016
Language and Cognition
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
● Different languages yield different patterns of thought - if you speak a diff lang than
someone else then you think diff
○ Linguistic determinism versus relativity - your lang determines your thought
○ Example the inuits and their diff types of words for snow
● Orwellian Newspeak
○ Changing the language forces one to think in a diff way
○ War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
○ ...loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this. It
also means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is
white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary - land determinism
○ Collateral damage,
■ Term created by governments to talk about the murder of civilians. It
changes how you think about it by saying collateral damage.
● In real world: if a language routinely makes a distinction, will shape thought about that
distinction
○ If a language distinguishes two things, that distinguish is highlighted in the
cognition
○ Example one language distinguished da, dah and english we don't so we don't
notice the distinction
○ We are not numb to it rather it is just not of importance to us
Research
● Colour perception
○ In russian, greek and turkish the blue on the slide mean different colours
■ They mean Mobi, lagibelt - to us it's blue blue but to them they see like
blue red
○ Languages use different divisions of colour spectrum
■ There are many divisions.
■ Order of emergence: every lang has black white red (light dark), then
either yellow green or blue, then brown, the purple pink orange grey
■ They tend to be grouped in certain ways. Some colours are diff for the
lang like african see yellow and orange together
○ If language has colour word, more neural activity for that colour; recognize colour
divisions quicker in RVF
■ Right visual field is recognize faster - linguistically faster
○ Language has altered how you perceive the world even in colour
● Piraha tribe in Amazon
○ Studied as they have little contact with outside world
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
○ Their numbers don't go higher then 2
■ Lack number words: one, two, many
○ Have difficulty with numerical cognition on set sizes >3
■ If i had 2 rocks in front of me, i look at the participant and ask them to
match it, they do it and then same for 3 rocks, same thing she does it, for
5 rocks the participants doesn’t understand this number sets 6
■ Unreliable past 3. Because they can do 1+2=3
■ If lang does not highlight it so they don’t care about this diff
● Verb and nouns
○ Children in verb dominant languages may understand means-end relations
earlier
■ Ex. turkish, mandarin
■ Verbs highlight the doing of the action you get the idea of causal
relationships earlier than kids in nonverbal lang.
● Gender: voices of everyday objects
○ Have to continually think of the gender they’re talking about
○ They will physically speak with a higher or lower voice in accordance to the
gender of an object
● Space and object
○ Korean versus English: in and on
■ Korean fit attachment matters, on if safely on, diff word if the object is not
completely on.
○ Containment vs surface attachment; tight vs loose fitting
○ Adults & toddlers, but not infants, differ in their perceptual attention based on
these language distinctions.
○ But see rural versus urban Tamil
● English: count/mass distinction; Japanese: nope
○ Eng. kids encode shape; Jap. kids encode substance not shape
○ Eng some nouns require counting or not
■ Ex. Im quite sick so i had to go to some place to be checked out and i
now am staying
■ You would reply that they are ‘in the hospital’
■ For english we understand the word hospital needs something in front
● Path languages: Spanish, Turkish; Manner languages: English, Chinese
○ No difference in path/manner across languages that stress path versus manner
■ Some languages are more pathy and other manner vers
■ path verb is a verb that encodes in the verb direction (exit)
■ Manner verb encodes primarily how you do something (walk)
○ However, children may have path advantage, so verbs in path languages may be
earlier learned
○ Example:english and spanish speakers would describes scenes viewed in a
video. Video was a bottle moving on top of the water across a rock, they describe
it as floating. Spanish places more importance on putting verb near the end as
it's less important
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Different languages yield different patterns of thought - if you speak a diff lang than someone else then you think diff. Linguistic determinism versus relativity - your lang determines your thought. Example the inuits and their diff types of words for snow. Changing the language forces one to think in a diff way. Loyal willingness to say black is white when party discipline demands this. It also means the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know black is white, and forget that one has ever believed the contrary - land determinism. Term created by governments to talk about the murder of civilians. It changes how you think about it by saying collateral damage. In real world: if a language routinely makes a distinction, will shape thought about that distinction. If a language distinguishes two things, that distinguish is highlighted in the cognition.
