9.12: Is Thought Dependent on, or even caused by Language?
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An early approach was proposed by J.B. Watson‘s in 1913. His peripheralist approach was that thought is a tiny not noticeable speech movement. While thinking a person performs speech movements as he or she would do while talking. A couple year later, in 1921 Wittgenstein poses the theory that the limits of a person's language mean the limits of that person's world. As soon as a person is not able to express a certain content because of a lack of vocabulary that person is not able to think about those contents as they are outside of his or her world. Wittgenstein's theory was doubted by some experiments with babies and deaf people.
To find some evidence for the theory that language and culture is affecting cognition Lian-hwang Chiu designed an experiment with American and Asian children. The children were asked to group objects in pairs so that these objects fit together. On picture that was shown to the children there was a cow, a chicken and some grass. The children had to decided which of the two objects fitted together. The American children mostly grouped cow and chicken because of group of animals they belong to. Asian children more often combined the cow with the grass as there is the relation of the cow normally eating grass.
In 2000 Chui repeated the experiment with words instead of pictures. A similar result was observed. The American children sorted their pairs taxonomically. Given the words "panda", "monkey" and "banana" American children paired "panda" and monkey". Chinese children grouped relationally. They put "monkey" with "banana". Another variation of this experiment was done with bilingual children. When the task was given in English to the children they grouped the objects taxonomically. A Chinese task caused a relational grouping. The language of the task clearly influenced on how to group the objects. That means language may affects the way people think.
The results of plenty experiments regarding the relation between language, culture and cognition let assume that culture affects language and cognition is affected by language.Our way of thinking is influenced by the way we talk and thought can occur without language but the exact relation between language and thought remains to be determined.