Language and thought

- Possessing a language is one of the central features that distinguishes humans from other species.
- One compelling version of this self-reflection is Helen Keller’s (1955) report that her recognition of the signed symbol for ‘water’.
- and “The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group”.
- We thank Jerry Fodor for a discussion of the semantics of raining, Ray Jackendoff for a discussion of phonology, as well as Dan Slobin and Dedre Gentner for their comments on this chapter.
- After all, that’s what it is for, or at least that is one of the things it is for: to transfer ideas from one mind to another mind.
- features of the grammar or the lexicon) organize the thought processes of its users? One famous “Aye” to this question appears in the writings of B.
- Whorf in the first half of the 20 th century.
- “We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated”.
- Far more than developing simple habituation, use of the linguistic system, we suggest, actually forces the speaker to make computations he or she might otherwise not make” (Pederson, Danziger, Wilkins, Levinson, Kita &.
- something significant, if it is true that human cognitive capacity is the truly distinctive and most remarkable characteristic of the species.” (Chomsky, 1975, p.
- by students of the mind who differ among themselves in almost all other regards.
- Before turning to the recent literature on language and thought, we want to emphasize that there are no ideologues ready to man the barricades at the absolute extremes of the debate just sketched.
- The question of just how to apportion the territory between the underlying semantics of sentences and the pragmatic interpretation of the sentential semantics is, of course, far from settled in linguistic and philosophical theorizing.
- that is, as an interpretive consequence of the linguistic representation itself.
- convey an assertion about rain falling here? That is, in the immediate geographical environment of the speaker? Or does the sentence itself.
- convey only that rain is falling, leaving it for the common sense of the listener to deduce that the speaker likely meant raining here and now rather than raining today in Bombay or on Mars.
- In light of the limitations of language, time, and sheer patience, language users make reference by whatever catch-as-catch-can methods they find handy, including the waitress who famously told another that “The ham sandwich wants his check” (Nunberg, 1978).
- In limiting cases, competent listeners ignore linguistically encoded meaning if it patently differs from what the speaker intended, for instance, by smoothly and rapidly repairing slips of the tongue.
- Oxford undergraduates had the wit, if not the grace, to snicker when Reverend Spooner said, or is reputed to have said, “Work is the curse of the drinking classes”.
- A different problem arises when languages categorize aspects of the world in ways that are complex and inconsistent.
- Speakers of the three languages differed in which objects (old and new) they classified together by name.
- For further discussion of the sometimes arbitrary and linguistically varying nature of the lexicon, even in languages which are typologically and historically closely related, see Kay (1996).
- We begin by mentioning the most famous and compelling case of a linguistic influence on perception: categorical perception of the phoneme (Liberman, 1970.
- The complexity of this phonological reorganization is often understood as a reconciliation (interface) of the cross-cutting phonetic and morphological categories of a particular language.
- Much of the literature on linguistic relativity can be understood as raising related issues in various perceptual and conceptual domains.
- The perceptual similarity space of the hues for such individuals is systematically different from that of individuals of normal vision.
- A seminal figure in reawakening interest in linguistic relativity was Roger Brown, the great social and developmental psychologist who framed much of the field of language acquisition in the modern era.
- could, by hypothesis, yield different organizations of the fundamental nature of one’s conceptual.
- more directly in terms of the paths traversed.
- The organization of the thought, on this view, might be dynamically impacted along its course by specific organizational properties of the individual language.
- So either all speakers of languages covertly compute all these several hundred properties as part of their representations of the contents of their sent and received messages or they compute only some of them.
- Semantic arenas of the present day language-thought investigation Objects and substances.
- When the sample was a hard-edged solid object, they extended the new word to all objects of the same shape, even when made of a different material.
- One might claim, then, that substance is in some sense linguistically basic for Japanese whereas objecthood is basic for English speakers because of the dominance of its count- noun morphology.
- The question is whether, since all of the languages formally mark the mass/count distinction in one.
- But another aspect of the results hints at a role for language itself in categorization.
- Thus for displays that blatantly fall to one side or the other of the object/substance boundary, the speakers of all the tested languages sort the displays in the same ways..
- As usual, neither the findings nor the interpretations of such experiments are easy to come by at the present state of the art.
- In light of all the findings so far reviewed, there is another interpretation of these results that does not implicate an effect of language on thought, but only an effect of language on language: one’s implicit understanding of the organization of a specific language can influence one’s interpretation of conversation.
- Derivatively, then, count syntax hints at object representation of the newly observed referent.
- in this case the categorization choices of the two language groups were essentially the same..
- away, through the forest, out of the room).
- Even though speakers of the two languages exhibited an asymmetry in encoding manner and path information in their verbal descriptions, they did not differ from each other in terms of classification or memory for path and manner.
- In the.
- 6 Subsequent analysis of the linguistic data revealed that Greek speakers were more likely to include manner of motion in their verbal descriptions when manner was unexpected or non-inferable, while English speakers included manner information regardless of inferability (Papafragou, Massey &.
- Just as obvious, however, is that specific language usage influences listeners’ interpretation of the speaker’s intended meaning if the stimulus situation leaves such interpretation unresolved.
- However, the case is by no means closed even on this issue, as successive probes of the rotation situation have continued to yield conflicting results both within and across language (e.g.
- Whorf concluded that this grammatical feature was bound to make certain conceptual distinctions easier to draw for the Hopi speaker because of the force of habitual linguistic practices..
- Furthermore, Korean learners were more advanced in their non-linguistic knowledge of sources of information than in their knowledge of the meaning of linguistic evidentials.
- Apparently, 15 minutes of training on the vertical overcame and completely reversed 20+ years of the habitual use of the horizontal in these.
- Other researchers propose that children come to acquire the adult number system by conjoining properties of the two pre-linguistic number systems via natural language.
- Carey, 2001 respectively) enables children to put together elements of the two previously available number systems in order to create a new, generative number faculty.
- 186] words, “in the course of development, children ‘bootstrap’ a generative understanding of number out of the productive syntactic and morphological structures available in the counting system”..
- By conjoining properties of these two systems, children gain insight into the properties of the adult conception of number (e.g.
- that each of the number words picks out an exact set of entities, that adding or subtracting exactly one object changes number, etc.
- an ability which was not afforded by either one of the prelinguistic calculation systems..
- however, no such advantage of the training language appeared with estimation problems.
- Such findings, as Spelke and her collaborators have emphasized, can be part of the.
- explanation of the special “smartness” of humans.
- However, familiar quantifiers lack the hallmark properties of the number system: they are not strictly ordered with respect to one another and their generation is not governed by the successor function.
- For example, the expression most men and women cannot be interpreted to mean a large majority of the men and much less than half the women [A.
- In light of the semantic disparities between the quantifier and the integer systems, it is hard to see how one could bootstrap the semantics of the one from the other..
- The children will not accept Two of the horses jumped over the fence as an adequate description of that event (even though it is necessarily true that if three horses jumped, then certainly two did).
- But at the same age, they will accept Some of the horses jumped over the fence as an adequate description even though it is true that all of the horses jumped.
- If anything, the children seem more advanced in knowledge of the meaning of number words than quantifiers so it is hard to see how the semantics of the former lexical type is to be bootstrapped from the semantics of the latter..
- If they see food hidden at the corner of a long and a short wall, they will search equally at either of the two such walls of a rectangular space after disorientation.
- this is so even if these corners are distinguishable by one of the long walls being painted blue, or having a special smell, etc.
- to the left of the blue wall].
- 7 Further studies show that success in this task among young children is sensitive to the size of the room – in a large room, more 4-year-olds succeed in combining geometric and landmark information (Learmonth, Nadel &.
- In short, success at the task seems to require encoding of the relevant terms in a specifically linguistic format..
- On this view, the output of the linguistic system just IS Mentalese: there is no other level of representation in which the information to the left of the blue wall can be entertained.
- “We cannot accept that the production of a sentence ‘The toy is to the left of the blue wall’ begins with a tokening of the thought THE TOY IS TO THE LEFT OF THE BLUE WALL (in Mentalese), since our hypothesis is that such a thought cannot be entertained independently of being framed in a natural language.”.
- But in Carruthers’ proposal, after hearing The toy is to the left of the blue wall, the interpretive device cannot decode the message into the corresponding thought, since there is no level of Mentalese independent of language in which the constituents are lawfully connected to each other..
- In this sense, understanding an utterance such as The picture is to the right of the red wall turns out to be a very different process than understanding superficially similar utterances such as The picture is to the right of the wall, or The picture is on the red wall (which do not, on this account, require cross-domain integration)..
- Despite its radical entailments, there is a sense in which Spelke’s proposal to interpret concept configurations on the basis of the combinatorics of natural language can be construed as decidedly nativist.
- Further, the assumption is that this knowledge is not itself attained through learning but belongs to the in- built properties of the human language device.
- Exactly these presuppositions have been the hallmark of the nativist program in linguistics and language acquisition (Chomsky, 1957.
- Notice in this regard that since these authors hold that any natural language will do as the source and vehicle for the required inferences, the principles at work here must be abstract enough to wash out the diverse surface-structural realizations of to the left of the blue wall in the languages of the world.
- and, for different but related reasons, just as systematically fail to understand other strings such as to the left of the blue idea.
- We agree that there are universal aspects of the syntax-semantics interface.
- For the present commentators, it is hard to see how shifting the burden of the acquisition of compositional semantics from the conceptual system to the linguistic system diminishes the radical nativist flavor of the position..
- We began with the many difficulties involved in radical versions of the linguistic relativity position, including the fact that language seems to underspecify thought, and to diverge from it as to the treatment of ambiguity, paraphrase, and deictic reference.
- Over the course of the discussion, our reading of the evidence put us close to what we take to be the “typological bootstrapping” and “thinking for speaking”.
- or to more radical reorganizations of the learners’ conceptual world (as in the reorganizational principles that stand between phonetics and phonology] is hard at the present time to say.
- But other commentators see this cross- linguistic diversity as much more limited and superficial than the blooming, buzzing confusion coming out of the tower of Babel.
- Many of these principles of language organization seem to map quite transparently from core knowledge of the kinds studied in infants (e.g..
- Aspects of the theory of syntax.
- Paper presented at the Meeting of the International Society on Infant Studies, Brighton, UK..
- Paper presented at the Biannual Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Washington, DC..
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences .
- Journal of the Acoustical Society of America .
- Perception of the speech code.
- Grammatical categories and cognition: A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.
- To appear, Proceedings of the 39 th Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics Society.
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, U S A .
- Early category and object development: Making sense of the blooming, buzzing confusion.
- Discrimination of cues in mazes: a resolution of the place-vs.- response question.
- development: Making sense of the blooming, buzzing confusion, 275-302..
- Proceedings of the 23 rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society..
- A cross-linguistic examination of the noun-category bias: Its existence and specificity in French- and Spanish-speaking preschool-aged children

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