Influence of Language

Recently a fellow writer named Beans, who has an awesome fashion blog commented on my behaviorism and language acquisition post. She mentioned a study that showed speakers of a language where genders are used are more likely to assign adjectives characteristic of that gender to the word.

When I first started studying Cognitive Science, and people would ask me what exactly Cognitive Science is, I would try to explain to them the Whorf Hypothesis. Now, originally I was going to write about the Whorf Hypothesis, however in my summer reading, I have come across something that has made me lose faith in it. I am still going to write about it, but I want to make sure I understand everything clearly enough to regurgitate it back to you guys.

The study Beans mentioned was conducted by Boroditsky and colleagues in 2003 (full citation at the end of the post), which followed on the tails of related studies. This research is supposedly evidence for the Whorf hypothesis. The first study conducted before the one mentioned was done by Sera and colleagues; in the study they took German, English, Spanish, and French speaking children and told them to pretend they were going to make a movie, and in the movie there were going to be objects that needed a voice. "Should it have a woman's or a man's voice in the movie?" the experimenter would ask the children. Native speakers of French and Spanish were more likely than German or English speakers to assign "gender" appropriate voice.

The second study, which was conducted by Boroditsky, was concerned with native Spanish and German speakers, although the test was conducted in English. In this study they asked to describe words from their native language in English.For example:

KEY

German (masculine): hard, heavy, jagged, useful

Spanish (feminine): little, lovely, shiny, tiny

BRIDGE

German (feminine): beautiful, elegant, peaceful, slender

Spanish (masculine): big, dangerous, strong, sturdy

These results, reflect that attributes of a noun may influence how somebody thinks of an object. If these results are genuine, then it surely pints the German language in an interesting light.

Of course this could all be a mix-up of correlation and causation. While the Whorf hypothesis suggests that different languages are assumed to lead to different worldview, it may be possible that different cultures lead to different worldviews. The two results listed above could simply be anecdotal. Like I said, I will touch upon this topic again in the near future when I know more about it. I plan I re-reading all of these articles and following up on this soon. Tell me what you think!

Boroditsky, L., L. A. Schmidt, and W. Phillips. "Sex, Syntax, and Semantics." Language in Mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition (2003): 61-79. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Print.

Sera, M. D., C. A. Berge, and J. Castillo Pintado. "Grammatical and Conceptual Forces in The Attribution of Gender." Cognitive Development 9 (1994): 261-92. Print.

Behaviorism and Language Acquisition

Read the first chapter of any Psych 100 book and you will be familiar with B. F. Skinner and behaviorism. Skinner was a radical behaviorist, he believed that we all had a reinforcement history, and we all developed response patterns to things that were positively reinforced in us, as well as adverse responses to things that had been negatively reinforced. (If you don't know what conditioning is, then check out the Wikipedia article on classical conditioning.) This was his explanation from everything to how the nature of societies developed to how we started to speak. He also likened cognitive science to creation science (asshole).Therefore, when someone asks you "Hey Jim how are you today?" your response of "I'm well thanks for asking Dick" is a conditioned response... well to Skinner anyways.

There is no set number of stimuli in this painting (artist: James Fowler)

Before Noam Chomsky was known for his political writings, or known for anything for that matter; in 1959 as a linguist, he wrote a review of Skinner's book Verbal Behavior. In the review he made several points against behaviorism. The first being that there is no set number of stimuli in certain objects, such as artwork. When any one person that sees a painting is bound to say or think anything in response to it, there is no way to record the amount of different responses. Second, Chomsky argued that our responses to new sentences come about because we have "internalised the grammer of our language". Skinner had said our responce to a new sentence would come about from a sentence that sounded simmilar to it.

We know today that Chomsky is right because we have solid proof of the internalization of grammar; the development of linguistic abilities in children. Children make up grammar rules that they could have never learned on their own. Irregular plurals ("sheeps", "fishs", "tooths") for example, are all common speech errors made by children, and reflect the fact that they are making grammar rules and inferences about the language they are learning as they go along. This all happens in the critical period, a time in everyone's life where they acquire the language(s) that they are immersed in. Tomorrow's post will be on the critical period.