9.17: Language, Culture and Cognition
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In the parts above we saw that there has been a lot of research of language, from letters through words and sentences to whole conversations. Most of the research described in the parts above was processed by English speaking researchers and the participants were English speaking as well. Can those results be generalised for all languages and cultures or might there be a difference between English speaking cultures and for example cultures with Asian or African origin?
Imagine our young man from the beginning again: Knut! Now he has to prepare a presentation with his friend Chang for the next psychology seminar. Knut arrives at his friend’s flat and enters his living-room, glad that he made it there just in time. They have been working a few minutes when Chang says: ”It has become cold in here!“ Knut remembers that he did not close the door, stands up and...”stop! What is happening here?!“
This part is concerned with culture and its connection to language. Culture, not necessarily in the sense of "high culture" like music, literature and arts but culture is the "know-how" a person must have to tackle his or her daily life. This know-how might include high culture but it is not necessary.
Culture and Language
Scientists wondered in how far culture affects the way people use language. In 1991 Yum studied the indirectness of statements in Asian and American conversations. The statement "Please shut the door" was formulated by Americans in an indirect way. They might say something like "The door is open" to signal that they want to door to be shut. Even more indirect are Asian people. They often do not even mention the door but they might say something like "It is somewhat cold today". Another cultural difference affecting the use of language was observed by Nisbett in 2003 in observation about the way people pose questions. When American speaker ask someone if more tea is wanted they ask something like "More tea?". Different to this Asian people would ask if the other one would like more drinking as for Asians it seems obvious that tea is involved and therefore mentioning the tea would be redundant. For Americans it is the other way round. For them it seems obvious that drinking is involved so they just mention the tea.
This experiment and similar ones indicate that people belonging to Asian cultures are often relation orientated. Asians focus on relationships in groups. Contrasting, the Americans concentrate on objects. The involved object and its features are more important than the object's relation to other objects. These two different ways of focusing shows that language is affected by culture.
A experiment which clearly shows these results is the mother-child interaction which was observed by Fernald and Morikawa in 1993. They studied mother-child talk of Asian and American mothers. An American mother trying to show and explain a car to her child often repeated the object "car" and wants the child to repeat it as well. The mother focuses on the features of the car and labels the importance of the object itself. The Asian mother shows the toy car to her child, gives the car to the child and wants it to give the car back. The mother shortly mentions that the object is a car but concentrates on the importance of the relation and the politeness of giving back the object.
Realising that there are plenty differences in how people of different cultures use language the question arises if languages affects the way people think and perceive the world.
What is the connection between language and cognition?
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
In the 1950s Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf proposed the hypothesis that the language of a culture affects the way people think and perceive. The controversial theory was question by Elenor Rosch who studied colour perception of Americans and Danis who are members of an stone-age agricultural culture in the Iran. Americans have several different categories for colour as for example blue, red, yellow and so on. Danis just have two main colour categories. The participants were ask to recall colours which were shown to them before. That experiment did not show significant differences in colour perception and memory as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis presumes.
Color-naming experiment by Roberson et al. (2000)
Categorical Perception
Nevertheless a support for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was Debi Roberson's demonstration for categorical perception based on the colour perception experiment by Rosch. The participants, a group of English-speaking British and another group of Berinmos from New Guinea were ask to name colours of a board with colour chips. The Berinmos distinguish between five different colour categories and the denotation of the colour names is not equivalent to the British colour denotation. Apart from these differences there are huge differences in the organisation of the colour categories. The colours named green and blue by British participants where categorised as nol which also covers colours like light-green , yellow-green , and dark blue . Other colour categories differ similarly.
The result of Roberson's experiment was that it is easier for British people to discriminate between green and blue whereas Berinmos have less difficulties distinguishing between Nol and Wap. The reaction to colour is affected by language, by the vocabulary we have for denoting colours. It is difficult for people to distinguish colours from the same colour category but people have less trouble differentiating between colours from different categories. Both groups have categorical colour perception but the results for naming colours depends on how the colour categories were named. All in all it was shown that categorical perception is influenced by the language use of different cultures.
These experiments about perception and its relation to cultural language usage leads to the question whether thought is related to language with is cultural differences.
Is thought dependent on, or even caused by language?
Historical theories
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.
Present research
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.