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[计时一]
HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Lera Boroditsky [6.11.09]
(LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.)
Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?
These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.
[280 words]
[计时二]
I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?
Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.
[392 words]
[计时三]
Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages? For some scholars, the answer to these questions has been an obvious yes. Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly.
Scholars on the other side of the debate don't find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don't include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn't mean that English speakers aren't paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they're not talking about them. It's possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.
Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it's distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.
Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it's impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it's impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results. So instead of arguing about what must be true or what can't be true, let's find out what is true.
[374 words]
[计时四]
Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."
The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.
[358 words]
[计时五]
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role. So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.
People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month"). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.
[426 words]
Continue reading:
http://edge.org/conversation/how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think
Babybearmm的温馨提示：Published in Science (Vol 336, 13 APRIL 2012), the following article is a review of the book:
[attachimg]101439[/attachimg]
The reviewer Robert C. Berwick is at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA.
[越障开始]
LANGUAGE
Me Tarzan, You Jane
In The Descent of Man, Darwin advanced a “Caruso” scenario for language’s origin: sexier singers got more mates, leading to language’s use for both communication and, crucially, thought. More than 140 years on, have we made any progress? Judging by The Origins of Grammar, not so much. James Hurford, an eminent Edinburgh University linguist, has been at the forefront of a recent revival of evolutionary thinking regarding the origin of language. The overarching principles of gradualism and continuity guide his account. He clearly means to stand on Darwin’s shoulders—evolution by natural selection via “numerous, successive, slight modifications.”
Hurford’s evolutionary story parallels the book’s three parts. First, from primate calls, prehumans pitched up with pairings of vocalized words and meanings; this “fi rst shared lexicon” grew, word by word. Second, a burgeoning stock of single word-meaning pairs led to two-word constructions (including “Me Tarzan, you Jane”) along with an ability to learn new words and sentence constructions. Third, driven by expansions in computational capacity and the pressure of cultural needs for communication, the steady drumbeat of two-word constructions led to three-word constructions and on to Shakespeare.
Hurford insists that virtually every aspect of human language is, at heart, a cultural construct— reinvented anew as each child grows up in a particular language community, with very little in common from language to language aside from our shared language learning capacity. Many linguists and cognitive scientists would disagree, arguing that our brain comes predisposed to eliminate as a potential human language a large range of otherwise logical possibilities.
Wide-ranging and often entertaining, Hurford’s three-part account is nonetheless just a story. Crucially, despite his unflagging commitment to Darwinism, he has missed even Darwin’s own solution to the problem of novelty, one readily applicable to language. For Hurford, gradualism and continuity entail changes of both form and function. But Darwin appreciated that there had to be discontinuities of function maintaining continuity of form. In Origin of Species, he singled out the transformation of swim bladders of fish into air-breathing lungs as a clear case of novel functions appearing as “wonderful metamorphoses” repurposing old forms.
Indeed, a relatively rapid emergence of language seems to square much better with the paleoarchaeological record. Whereas Hurford’s account demands a long, slow trek from symbolic activity and single words to language, unequivocal evidence of symbolic activity first appears associated with Homo sapiens (e.g., the engraved shells in Blombos cave, 77,000 years ago). Going back that far takes only 2600 generations, too little time for a slow trek.
In addition, Hurford repeatedly presents interpretations without providing data to support them: “It is quite possible that Homo erectus, perhaps for over a million years, had symbolic pre-syntactic communicative behaviour.” “The first evolutionary rudiments of language permitted somewhat larger group size.” “It is conceivable that the combined effects of increased group size, increased cooperation within groups, increased trust, and shared intentionality permitted some relaxation of genetic control…. Thus the first learned arbitrary symbols.” Doubtless, any of these claims could be correct. The real questions are whether any of them are true and how we might ever determine that.
To support his view that today’s complex languages evolved from simple ones, he discusses three extant “linguistic fossils”: Creole languages; a pair of hypersimplified languages (Pirahã, with fewer than 500 speakers in the Amazonian basin, and Riau, spoken by some 5 million urban Indonesians); and the trajectory of child language acquisition (adopting Haeckel’s “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”). However, the empirical basis for his accounts is questionable. Take Creoles: They have articles (e.g., “the” and “a”), whereas “more complex” languages such as Chinese or Russian lack them. Creole articles have a more irregular, complex distribution than those in “complex” French, Italian, or German. And questions in Creoles are formed roughly as in English, with question words (e.g., what) at the front of the sentences—another complexity not found in Chinese.
Biologists expecting a worked-out evolutionary model will walk away disappointed. Despite its subtitle, the book lacks explicit fitness calculations, survival and reproduction schedules, generation times, and, indeed, anything resembling the basics of population or behavioral genetics. Hurford reveals what does count for him as an evolutionary argument while explaining why prehuman vocabularies should get larger: “Couching it in evolutionary terms, one would presumably assume there is some advantage to individuals in a group in having a large vocabulary.” However, evolutionary explanations typically demand far more than just an unproven assumption about advantage to individuals.
Tellingly for such an inherently historical science as evolution, the book contains very little about established hominin prehistory. There isn’t even an illustration of perhaps the single most striking fact about hominin evolution: whereas this clade once formed a bushy tree with many coexisting species, now there is only one lineage left, us. To be sure, Hurford does not seek to provide a historical explanation—he identifies his concern as “the ‘Why?’ and ‘How?’” of the origins of syntax. But history does matter. The available evidence points to a relatively recent appearance of symbolic activity in the human lineage, the adventitious convergence of old forms brought together for a new function just as Darwin suggested, roughly at the time of the last push of Homo sapiens out of Africa, 70,000 years ago. We can shed all of Hurford’s speculative baggage: There is no need for “symbolic behavior” in Australopithicenes or even Neandertals; no necessity for special pleading about Creole “simplicity” or eccentric “living fossil” languages; no call for language development to recapitulate phylogeny; and no difficulty reconciling the paradoxically long periods of apparent stasis in the paleoanthropological record with the observed bursts of functional innovation. All these empirical problems fade away, leaving us with a story altogether different from the one told in The Origins of Grammar.
[962 words] |
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发表于 2012-5-28 20:02:17
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发表于 2012-5-28 20:05:16
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谢谢姐姐。。偶懂啦~~~ 
