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Debate opens anew on language and its effect on cognition
By Gareth Cook , Globe Staff, 2/14/2002
In English, time rushes forward. In Mandarin Chinese, it moves down. The
past lies above, and the future lies below.
So is the mind of a Mandarin speaker different from the mind of an
English speaker?
The question is one of science's loaded topics, a politically charged
theory with a racist past. But researchers now say they are uncovering
proof that it may be true.
At a major scientific conference in Boston opening today, a half-dozen
specialists in the resurgent field will debate the role of language in
shaping the way people think about basic concepts such as space and
time. A growing body of research suggests simple quirks of language -
such as the lack of a word for left or right - can fundamentally alter
the way people perceive the world around them.
Their findings could have dramatic implications for psychology,
anthropology, and even international relations. But the researchers are
cautious. Their work touches on politically divisive issues, such as the
importance of bilingual education, and raises uncomfortable questions,
such as whether speakers of certain languages are superior in some
respects to others.
''This suggests the private mental lives of people who speak different
languages may be very different,'' said Lera Boroditsky, an assistant
professor at MIT who conducted an experiment comparing Mandarin and
English speakers.
Boroditsky is one of the researchers presenting her work at the American
Association for the Advancement of Science conference at the Hynes
Veterans Convention Center this week. Last year, she published a study
in which she asked people to answer simple time sequence questions while
watching a video screen. When objects on the screen move vertically, the
Mandarin speakers are able to answer faster than English speakers -
implying that their brains processed time questions differently, and
hinting that there could be other differences.
In some ways, this idea is not a new one. It first arose early in the
20th century in the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, an engineer who
studied the Hopi Indians. The Hopi language does not have past, present,
and future tenses, and Whorf theorized that the Hopi had a profoundly
different notion of time than English speakers.
His idea - that language determined thought - became known as the
''Whorfian hypothesis.'' At a time when the image of the noble savage
held sway, the theory was both beguiling and influential. It took the
romantic notion of a national character - that the French, for example,
have a particular way of thinking - and extended it to all the planet's
disparate tribes.
Arriving before the tools of modern linguistics and anthropology had
been developed, the Whorfian hypothesis was used to support theories
that ranged from arrogant to outright racist, such as the idea that
''primitive'' peoples were incapable of thinking about abstract ideas.
But as science progressed, Whorfian thinking crumbled. Anthropologists
documented the cultural and verbal sophistication of supposedly
primitive tribes. And linguists also came to realize that thoughts are
much richer than language, undercutting the very notion that people
would need a word to think a thought.
What researchers are probing now is whether each language, with its
unique set of concepts and distinctions and vocabulary, causes people to
experience the world differently - a feeling shared by many who have
learned another language, but which has proven exceptionally difficult
for scientists to document.
''There is this disconnect between the science and people's intuitions,
but now I think that gap is being closed,'' said Boroditsky, whose work
on Mandarin Chinese was published last year.
Outside of English, many languages give nouns a gender, a grammatical
distinction that linguists have long considered to be without any real
meaning. But in 2000 Boroditsky found that the system subtly changes a
speaker's experience of everyday objects.
The word ''key,'' for example, is masculine in German and feminine in
Spanish. Boroditsky recruited two groups of volunteers, native German
speakers and native Spanish speakers, who spoke English well. She then
asked them to name three adjectives to describe objects.
She found a consistent pattern of German speakers using more masculine
terms to describe the key - such as ''hard, heavy, jagged'' - while
Spanish speakers favored more feminine descriptions, such as ''golden,
intricate, lovely.'' Boroditsky said she is now considering studying how
the design of bridges - a masculine word in Spanish, but a feminine word
in German - differs between the two cultures.
Another researcher has found evidence that languages which have many
terms for color, such as English, give their speakers an advantage in
remembering them.
Critics say the findings are all small effects, well short of profound.
''What happens to these neo-Whorfians is they keep backing off,'' said
Lila Gleitman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. ''Their
position then becomes sufficiently weak that it holds no interest.''
Now, though, the research is turning to even more controversial ground,
how speakers of different languages remember events. Gleitman said she
had just completed research, accepted but not yet published by the
journal Cognition, showing that the different verb structures in English
and Spanish do not cause speakers to remember events differently.
But Boroditsky said that she is beginning to uncover ''interesting
differences'' in ongoing research into how speakers of Turkish and other
languages remember events.
''Since September 11, the English-speaking world is waking up to the
fact that other cultures not only speak differently, they think
differently,'' said Susan Bassnett, a specialist on translation at the
University of Warwick. ''One of the problems of global English is that
native English speakers are losing their skills in foreign languages and
so are increasingly unable to access those alternative realities.''
Gareth Cook can be reached by e-mail at cook@globe.com
This story ran on page A10 of the Boston Globe on 2/14/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
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