Language: Effect On Thought And Perception

lyric poem Effect On Thought And PerceptionBegley, Sharon. Whats in a Word Why Language May work Our Thoughts. Newsweek. Harmon-Newsweek, 9 July 2009. Web. 7 October 2010.Begleys article investigates various points within psychologist Lera Boroditskys work on linguistic process and learning, raising such examples as whether a languages nouns are feminine or male train an effect on how speakers of that language view everyday objects and how sort out war crys in other languages for different colors whitethorn even push how we distinguish those colors. Begley also points out that how each languages system of grammar can affect the agency we describe similar events.Boroditsky, Lera. How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think? Whats bordering Dispatches on the Future of Science. Ed. Max Brockman. New York Vintage Books, 2009. 116-129. Print.In her essay How Does Language Shape the Way We Think, psychologist Boroditsky argues that language does indeed play a crucial role in how we humans mean and how we perceive the world. Referencing her experiments results for the bulk of her essay, she maintains that language affects the way we think closeand so describenot only the concrete but also the elevate like special relationships and time.Boroditsky, Lera. Linguistic Relativity. MIT. n.d. PDF File.In an experiment designed to test psychologist benzoin Lee Whorfs 1956 suggestion that how one analyzes and responds to the world reflects differences in their languagea suggestion long- addicted by the scientific community, Boroditsky asserts that language has a profound effect on thought and perception. While also describing how language influences perceptions of space and time, Boroditsky demonstrates how differences in grammar contribute to different shipway of describing and perceiving amounts, shapes, and other characteristics of objects.Casasanto, Daniel, et al. How Deep are the Effects of Language on Thought? Cambridge, MA MIT Press. n.d. PDF File.Fro m experiments conducted to test whether language affects how speakers experience the world, Casasanto et al. suggest that, through on lingual and two non- lingual experiments in native speakers of various languages that our grammar does influence how we mentally envision abstract ideas and that language influences even the most basic of psychological processes.Deutscher, Guy. Does Language Shape How You Think? New York Times. The New York Times, 26 August 2010. Web. 10 October 2010.In his article Does Language Shape How You Think, Deutscher offers a general view of the controversy touch the question of languages influence of thought. Deutscher get-go describes the fallout from psychologist Whorfs proposal about language and its connection to the mind, and then references other noted experiments designed to test the suggestion. He then depicts the general outcome of these experiments as that individual languages do contribute to bankers bills in perception toward objects and spa ce.Harms, William, and Robert Sanders. UC Berkeley. 31 January 2006. Web. 7 October 2010.Harms and William begin their review by acknowledging the difficult scientists call for in testing whether language plays a direct part in how we see the world. They promote a paper published in the calendar monthly journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that suggests that language does affect perception, but only in the discipline half of our visual field in other terms, what we see out of our right eye. Citing experiments based on color conducted at UC Berkeley, Harms and Sanders describe the papers argument that languagewhich is predominantly based in the left hemisphere of our brain, which processes the right visual fieldmay help us recognize colors more quickly in our right visual field but provide slower comprehension in our left.Ramachandran, V.S. and E.M. Hubbard. SynesthesiaA windowpane into Perception, Thought, and Language. 2001. PDF File.In their paper, Ramachand ran and Hubbard attempt to debunk certain myths about synesthesia and the people who experience it. Synesthesia is an interesting and strange phenomenon in which a synesthetic person may experience a combination of sensory activity at once, such as seeing the number 7 and screening it as a dark blue-green or eating an egg and then hearing a high note. A phenomenon not under both serious experimentation for some time, Ramachandran and Hubbard conduct experiments to find links to their twelve overriding ideas and see how synesthesia connects to language and how and why sensory activity is perceived.Regier, terry cloth and Paul Kay. Language, Thought, and Color Whorf was Half Right. 2009. PDF File.Through experiments conducted to test Whorfs possibility of language and its effect on how we perceive and adapt to the world, Regier and Kays results suggest that Whorf had the correct idea, for the most part. development color and placement to test how quickly participants recognized a d ifferent shade of blue among a circle of other blue squares enabled them to conclude that separate languages that have varying degrees of classification for colors influences color perception mainly in the right half of the visual field. They also suggest that the amount of distinction a language has between individual shades contributes to the speed of color perception.Stafford, Amy. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Minnesota State U, n.d. Web. 10 October 2010.In her paper Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, Stafford describes the thought process tail assembly psychologist Whorfs proposal that semantics impact our awareness of the world. She also provides different views on the idea, suggesting methods and studies that offer a more rounded opinion. Stafford then defines how she believes Whorfs hypothesis can affect our arrest of each other and of individual cultures across the world.Thierry, Gullame, et al. Unconscious Effects of Language-Specific Terminology on Pre-Attentive Color Perception. 2009. PDF File.In an attempt to discover whether languages effect on ones perception is driven by conscious, language-based evaluation of the environment or if the difference lies in the psychological processing of speakers of other languages, Thierry et al. conduct color experiments. Using the separate classical words for light and dark blue (ghalazio and ble), and the side versions, Thierry et al. suggest that Greek speakers can distinguish between shades of blue more quickly than English speakers because of the distinct separate words for each color instead of adding light or dark to the main color of blue.Anne SeeleyProfessor YerksComposition 10611 October 2010Language and its Effect on Thought and PerceptionEven with the incredible advances in technology and science, certain areas of the brain remain a mystery to scientists. As scholars endeavor to discover more connections and illuminate reasons for why we humans behave cognitively the way we do, hypotheses proposed in the past th at may have fallen out of favor are being reexamined using todays technology. One such proposal, known as the Whorf Hypothesis, attempts to show the link between the uniquely human quality of spoken and scripted language and the effect it has on our thoughts and perceptions of the world (Stafford). This relatively recently revived proposition provides ample room for ground-breaking questions, and everyone from scientists to philosophers have argued for and against it, for nearly seventy years (Begley).Benjamin Lee Whorf, states Guy Deutscher, author of the New York Times article Does Language Shape How You Think, was the psychologist of disputable reputation that suggested in 1940 that language was not only the fair through which we hap, but that it defines the way we think and consequently restricts what we are able to think. Deutscher explains that Whorf proposed that different languages have such a profound impact on the way we think that Native American languages impose on th eir speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, and thus these speakers do not have the aforementioned(prenominal) grasp on some of our most basic impressions, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects and actions as speakers of other languages do. Though his theory entranced the scientific community and world at large for a time, gradually the idea that language constricts our ability to see reality faded and was in conclusion abandoned, especially when, Deutscher quips, it was shown that Whorf never effectively had any evidence to support his fantastic claims. Recently, however, new studies have been conducted whose results suggest that language really does change the way we think and perceive the world.Lera Boroditsky, a noted Stanford psychologist, argues in her essay How Does Language Shape the Way We Think? that language does indeed form the way we think about abstract concepts like space and time as well as concrete objects. The resul ts of her experiments on the connection between language and thought (known as linguistic relativity) are fascinating for instance, in an experiment examining how speakers of different languages process the concept of time, English speakers (who talk about time in terms of horizontal spacial metaphorse.g., The best is ahead of us or The worst is behind us) will point in a horizontal direction (such as behind or adjoining to them) when asked where yesterday would be on a three-dimensional timeline. Mandarin speakers, however, use a vertical metaphor for time e.g., the next month is the down month and the last month is the up month and will most often point vertically to describe the concept of yesterday. Boroditsky offers another thought-provoking insight that the luckiness of grammar in many languages where nouns are given sexual practices actually changes the way speakers perceive those objects. In her experimental results, it was shown that while German and Spanish speakers bo th understood the concept of a key, they thought about and consequently described the key in completely different ways. The feminine Spanish word for keys is llaves, and were described as golden, intricate, little, and benignant whereas the German speakers described the masculine Schlssel as being hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and serrated This trend continues when describing abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time. Boroditsky urges us to look at noteworthy artworks that personify these concepts, and states that it turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical sexual urge of the word in the artists native language. Though Boroditsky made no comment of it in her essay, these results raise another question how would English speakerswho give no gender to nounsdescribe an object like a key or a concept like time? Nevertheless, experiments like these are clearing the path for even more intr iguing theories about language and thought, such as those conducted in the spirit of understanding a condition known as synesthesia.Synesthesia, according to V.S. Ramachandran and E.M. Hubbards paper SynesthesiaA Window into Perception, Thought, and Language is an intriguing phenomenon in which an otherwise normal person experiences sensations in one modality when a second modality is stimulated, like reading the word kindness and seeing it as a salmon-pink color or thinking of the concept of hope and tasting an egg. Though many may at first think that instances of synesthesia are in fact metaphors used every day, such as a loud color, Ramachandran and Hubbard propose that it is an actual condition that may run in families and creative people and is more common in females than males. They also suggest that a synesthetic person are more likely to have more than one form of synesthesia if they already have one, such as seeing words as having colors as well as seeing colors when hearin g music. As a synesthetic person, I can attest that it is not an imaginary or imaginative event, but an actual phenomenon. Over years, I have encountered constant and various forms of synesthesia in myself, including the word-color association, a letter- and number-color association (as well as a gender association for earn and numbers), and, less prominently, a music-color association. This fascinating condition is an excellent breeding ground for continuing experiments to see how deeply language affects our cognitive behaviors and how we perceive the world.Using language is not something that we often think about during our lives, and yet recent experiments suggest that it has a fundamental influence on how we respond to our environments and view the world. Once an abandoned proposition, the connection between language and thought gains notoriety throughout the scientific community. As scientists strive to understand just how deeply it impacts our mental capacities, our ability t o communicate through spoken and written language remains one of our most profound human characteristics.