Valeria Scimia - Student # 100156703 {University of Derby}
Essay Cognitive Psychology
Analyse and evaluate the view that language affects cognition. Refer to relevant empirical evidence in your answer.
Language is considered to be a human gift. It allows people to communicate their thoughts to one another and it is essential for living a normal social life. It is a cognitive capacity that has always interested psychologists of all times. There are many languages spoken in the world, people from different countries speak different languages, each of them differs from another. In the recent years psychologists and linguistics have been interested in understanding whether those differences may represent also differences in the way people perceive the world. It has always been a common thought that it is our cognition to shape the way we speak but recently studies are showing results that encourage the hypothesis that language plays a more important role in shaping the way people think and perceive reality. This essay will focus on reviewing the history behind this idea and some empirical researches that were carried out to understand whether language can affect cognition, an hypothesis often considered empirically untestable therefore scientifically incorrect (Boroditsky, 2009).
The study of how we come to speak and learn language has populated psychological literature of all times. The fact that children speak their thoughts aloud led behaviorists, observing this particular behaviour, to believe that language and thought could be the same thing. Studies have shown that thought is often accompanied by covert speech (Harley, 1995), but the relationship between the two has been debated amongst philosophers and linguistics. Some, like Chomsky, believed that language and thought are independent from one another, others like Piaget argued that cognitive development accompanies language development (Harley, 1995). Eve Clark (2004) reported observations made upon the developing of space concepts by children. She concluded that the cognitive experience is acquired by the children before verbalization. They adapt their acquired cognitive representation to the reference language only later in their years. Humans therefore retain the full cognitive experience about space, while language represents just few of its aspects. The use of language can provide a diversity of perspectives used to describe an event or object, but it is the full cognitive representation of the event or object that is used when verbalization is not needed (e.g. when thinking about something). But verbalizing cognitive concepts is important for the perception other people may have of one another.
To first raise the question that words could indeed change the way people perceived reality was a fire insurance engineer, Whorf (1956, as cited in Harley). During his employment he noticed of how big importance were the words used, and how an incorrect use of terminology could actually cause errors in judgment and therefore accidents (Harley, 1995). Together with linguistic Sapir, they generated the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stating that language determines the way we think and perceive the world, therefore it is the language we speak that determines our cognitive processes. This was a strong hypothesis, and a weaker version was later proposed by Miller and McNeil (1969), stating that language does affect perception. This latter version was the only one to be empirically testable (as cited in Harley, 1995).
To test this hypothesis many studies were conduced on different areas of human perceptions, like the perception of time, space or colors.
One interesting study about the perception of time and space was made on English native speakers and native Mandarin speakers. Because Mandarin language arranges the concept of time in a vertical way, the research was performed to understand if language did indeed influence the way Mandarin speakers differed from English speakers on the perception of time. Laboratory tests showed that English speaker were unable to perceive time vertically, as English language has a horizontal representation of time, but Mandarin speakers had no trouble with the vertical representation of it (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, McCormick, 2010). Other studies have been made on gender loaded and non gender loaded languages to better understand if grammatical gender could influence the sex categorization in speakers. Gender loaded languages are those like Italian, Spanish and Russian, where all parts of the sentence need to reflect the gender of the object or noun, so the determines, verb and adjectives will all be presented in a gender form (masculine or feminine) depending on the noun. Other languages, like English, are not gender loaded and the sentence does not need all elements to reflect the gender of the noun. There are also languages that have two grammatical genders for the referent (like Italian and French) and others that have more than two genders, like German that has also a neutral grammar category (Elieff, Burch, Forbes, Rodriguez, Dubois, 2002). Many studies have tried to understand if grammatical gender can also influence the way people semantically think about the world. A more recent study has confirmed that for those language with only two genders and that are gender loaded (such as French or Italian), grammatical gender influences the categorization of semantic representations, but the same result could not be found for languages that had multiple gender categories or none (Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli, Dworzynski, 2005). This result suggests that grammatical gender does affect “thinking for speaking”, that is it is crucial when forming a sentence because all parts need to reflect the referent’s gender. It could be that a native Italian speaker needs to categorize the object or person into grammatical gender in order to obtain proper syntax in the sentence (Vigliocco et al., pag.513). Studies like the latter suggest indeed that language does have an effect on the semantic of the people speaking it. More studies on second language acquisition should be carried on to understand whether people that learn a different language will also start perceiving the world according to the new language (Boroditsky, July 2010).
But if the case is indeed that language does affect the way people perceive the outside world, what about the use of violent language or misleading words? In nowadays society it can be noticed a large use of language aimed at obtaining a certain purpose, thinking for example about advertisement where wrong information may be given out in such a way that the viewer starts believing it as real. One may think about the war on drugs, made by the US government against marijuana. The use of improper terminology and its association with heavier and more dangerous drugs was so heavy, that in some States it was wrongly classified as narcotic, a medical term used to classify opiates (Pinel, 2007, pag.379). It was already medically known that marijuana was not to be considered a narcotic, but the use of the word next to it made the population scared and confused to the point that still to this day people are not aware of the real chemical differences between marijuana and narcotics. This example suggests how the wrong use of labels and categorization may lead people to act in a certain way. There have been studies focused on the way people use words to categorize and label others. Hoffman, Baer and Mischel (1984) researched how the use of language was connected to trait categorization. They carried out a research aiming to see whether people tended to categorize more when they were expecting to engage in a conversation regarding a subject than when they expected not to. The result was that people who expected to engage in a conversation about someone tended to list more trait categories about the subject than those who expected not. This suggests that the idea of talking about someone or something reinforces the way people use trait categories and labels about it. So, it can be imagined in a school environment, for example, how this may influence the way peers talk and use word categories against each others.
Poteat and DiGiovanni (2010) studied the relationship between sexualized (or homophobic) talk and bullying, and the relationship of this biased talk with personal prejudice. Teenagers tend to use sexualized talk against their peers or against objects, inducing fear into sexual minorities. The results of this research showed how the use of biased talk was linked to high sexual prejudice amongst teenagers, especially boys.
They suggest in their paper how crucial it is to include teaching of the proper use of language and to tackle biased language when working with children in rehabilitation programs in order to minimize verbal bullying.
A last example of how the improper use of language could cause people to act and shape their cognitive perception of the world could be the terrorism debate. Politicians, mass-media and newspapers some years ago have begun an anti-terrorism campaign often referring wrongly to certain religious and cultural groups. A study that took place at Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust discussed the way UK ministers were using misleading language regarding terrorism, as it included nuances that could be interpreted as supporting the terrorists as soldiers instead of criminals. It was also mentioned how certain remarks about religious and cultural groups could lead the population to treat and perceive those groups in a racist and discriminating way (Politics.co.uk, 2006).
All these examples, supporting the weaker version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, that language does affect perception, lead to new questions and evoke new ways the hypothesis should be tested. A pioneer in this field, Lera Borodistky, suggests that new studies should be directed at the manipulation of language and its effects on cognition, as it is not clear at this point whether the correlation between different languages and the difference in its semantic are due to cognitive capacity depending on the language or simply to the culture that speaks the language. MIT studies have shown that when people are taken off the ability to use spoken language during nonlinguistic tasks, like counting and doing arithmetic tasks, their performance drops severely. This shows how much humans need language to support a number of activities besides speaking. It could be crucial to the understanding of human behaviour if the structures that are present on our language determine so profoundly the way we perceive reality and the way we are perceived by other human beings in the world. (Boroditsky, 2010).
The differences in languages could point to much deeper differences amongst cultures and the people that speak certain languages, thus the importance of understanding this relationship is strong, as it could help people live a better life based on better communication patterns. If language can really shape the way we perceive the world and we are constantly submitted to many inputs, it is each one’s responsibility to pay attention to the appropriate language to use and to be open to always double check the sources before making up the mind about something, as the improper use of words and labels could bias the perception of reality for us and for the people around us.
Language is a gift but it is also a communication tool that should not be underestimated and should always be nurtured from childhood. These new researches could help develop education programs aimed at children and teenagers to improve and appreciate their use of language.
Reference:
Boroditsky L. (2009) How does our language shape the way we think? In Brockman Max (Ed.) What’s Next? Dispatches on the future of science. Retrieved from the WordWideWeb 18 December, 2010: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html
Boroditsky L. (2010) Lost in translation. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from the WorldWideWeb 18 December, 2010: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/
Boroditsky L., Fuhrman O. & McCormick K. (2010) Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently? Cognition, 118(1), 123-9
Clark E.V. (2004) How language acquisition builds on cognitive development. Trends in Cognitive Sceinces, 8(10), 472 - 477
Harley T. (1995) Language, thought, and the precursors of language. In T. Harley (Ed.) The psychology of language: From data to theory (pp. 311-350) West Sussex: Hove Books
Hoffman C., Mischel W. & Baer J.S. (1984) Language and person cognition: Effects of communicative set on trait attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(5), 1029 – 1043
Pinel. J.P.J (2006) Biopsychology (6th Edition), USA: Pearson Education
Politics.co.uk (2006) Terror talk “exploiting politics of fear”. Retrieved from the WorldWideWeb 30 December, 2010: http://www.politics.co.uk/News/domestic-policy/crime/terrorism/terror-talk-exploiting-politics-fear-$457526.htm
Poteat P.V. & DiGiovanni C.D. (2010) When biased language use is associated with bullying and dominance behavior: The moderating effect of prejudice. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 39, 1123 – 1133
Sera M.D., Elieff C., Forbes J., Burch M.C., RodrÃguez W. & Dubois D.P. (2002) When language affects cognition and when it does not: an analysis of grammatical gender and classification. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 131(3), 377 – 397
Vigliocco G., Vinson D.P., Paganelli F. & Dworzynski K. (2005) Grammatical gender effects on cognition: Implications for language learning and language use. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 134(4), 501 – 520
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