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Here is a TED talk on this issue. I know we've talked about it before, but she presents some good evidence. I particularly was struck by the brain scan differences when cultures have many different names for different blue colors, versus those that just have variations. I also thought it interesting that cultures that have gender nouns tend to describe masculine ones with more masculine descriptors (large) or feminine ones with more feminine words (pretty). Or - Aboriginal communities describe almost everything by directions (east and west), rather than by left or right. Your thoughts?
 
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We also should certainly reinforce our prior belief that, as Lane Greene aptly put it, "language nudges thought (in certain circumstances)". Even modest statistical differences in the way that different language communities tend to express things may correlate with modest differences in the way that their members remember things, if the experimental circumstances are carefully calibrated to produce memory performance in a range that allows these effects to be measured.

Boroditsky and Liberman had a debate on this on the Ecomonist website. The subject was “Does language shape thought?" Boroditsky was for, Liberman was against. The page is gone, but I saved this from Liberman’s closing remarks:

quote:
For evidence of this relative weakness [of the linguistic relativity hypothesis], we need look no further than some of Lera Boroditsky's excellent recent research. Her work with Caitlin Fausey5 suggests that English speakers are somewhat more likely than Spanish speakers to specify an agent in describing accidental events ("She broke the vase" versus "The vase broke"), and also somewhat more likely to remember who the agent was. These effects, though statistically significant, were quite small, in absolute terms as well as in comparison to the within-group variation. Thus students at the Universidad de Chile were on average 4.4% worse at remembering accidental agents than intentional ones, while Stanford students were on average 1.9% better.6 Even to get this much of an effect, the event videos had to be carefully crafted to make the incidents and agents as bland and unmemorable as possible. Furthermore, in a follow-up experiment, the authors found that you can turn English speakers into Spanish speakers-for the purposes of this paradigm-by having them listen to 24 non-agentive sentences before the start of the experiment.

Here a lifetime of linguistic and cultural influence is overwhelmed by a minute or two of passive listening! Similarly, linguistic effects on measures of individualism are twice as small as the effects of two minutes of silent thought about your similarities or differences to others;7 and linguistic effects on orientation experiments are roughly as strong as the effects of room decor.8

5 Caitlin Fausey and Lera Boroditsky, "English and Spanish speakers remember causal agents differently", proceedings of the 30th annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2008

6 Mark Liberman, "Never mind the conclusions, what's the evidence?", Language Log 8/30/2010

7 Mark Liberman, "How to turn Americans into Asians (or vice versa)", Language Log 8/15/2008

8 Peggy Li and Lila Gleitman, "Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning", Cognition, 83(3): 265-294, 2002.

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Interesting, Goofy. Isn't this similar to Chomsky's view?
 
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Chomsky said that languages were only superficially different. At a deeper level all languages are the same. Boroditsky seems to disagree. She seems to think that different languages are different at a deeper level.

I don’t think the evidence we have found (that language nudges thought in certian circumstances) has any bearing on the theory of Universal Grammat.

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What did you think of her comments about languages with gender nouns attributing gender descriptors to them? Unfortunately I only know Spanish and I didn't notice that. But does it seem to be the case for other languages?
 
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Boroditsky says

quote:
So if you ask German and Spanish speakers to, say, describe a bridge, like the one here -- "bridge" happens to be grammatically feminine in German, grammatically masculine in Spanish -- German speakers are more likely to say bridges are "beautiful," "elegant" and stereotypically feminine words. Whereas Spanish speakers will be more likely to say they're "strong" or "long," these masculine words.


The TED talk site used to have footnotes but they are gone. So I dont know what research she bases this claim on.
 
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In this article she says something similar.
https://www.edge.org/conversat...ape-the-way-we-think

And she says: “And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers.”

Here a lifetime of linguistic and cultural influence is easily overwhelmed.

Her reference is:
http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/gender.pdf
L. Boroditsky et al. "Sex, Syntax, and Semantics," in D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow, eds., Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 61–79.

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Originally posted by goofy:

Her reference is:
http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/gender.pdf
L. Boroditsky et al. "Sex, Syntax, and Semantics," in D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow, eds., Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 61–79.


This is worth reading. In order to remove the cultural factor, they taught native English speakers a grammatical distinction in a fictional language (section 4.7). The subjects described objects in the masculine grammatical category with adjectives judged to be masculine, the same way Spanish and German speakers did. But to me this means that English speakers learned a new grammatical system and it quickly affected their thinking. Yes language nudges thought, but thought can be easily nudged in a different direction.
 
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