Language and thought

Introduction

A linguistic definition of language is ‘language shapes our ideas, thought processes and experience of the word’ (shape means causally determines and delimits).

There has been considerable interest in the question of the relationship between thought and language and the similarities and differences that exist in thinking between members of different language communities.

One of the earliest attempts to provide a theoretical account of the relationship between language and thought was made by the behaviourists. John Watson, the founder of behaviourism, argued that thinking was nothing more than inner speech. It may be true that most people sometimes engage in inner speech when thinking about difficult problems.

Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued that thought was purely linguistic and that the kinds of mental processes which animals or small children engaged in wasn’t really thinking all. He claimed that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits to my world,’ by this he meant that we could only think about and understand the world through language, so that if our language does not possess certain ideas or concepts, then they cannot exist for us.

Many psychologists argue that language can determine the way we think about objects or events. Others contend that language is not merely a means of expression but actually determines our very ideas, thoughts and perceptions, that is not simply how but what we think and perceive depends upon language.

Among those who adopt this latter view are Benjamin Lee Whorf and

Edward Sapir. They reached very similar conclusions quite independently of each other, but their theory has become known as the Sapir-Whorf Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis or better known as the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. The hypothesis suggests that thinking depends ...

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Among those who adopt this latter view are Benjamin Lee Whorf and

Whorf (1941) focuses on the differences between languages and in it’s strong form, asserts that an individual’s particular native language determines the way the individual thinks and perceives the world. Whorf was particularly interested in the languages of North American Indians and noted that the Hopi have a single term to denote a flying object, whereas English distinguishes between birds, insects, planes, helicopters and so on. But it is not only the vocabulary of a language that determines how and what people think and perceive but also the grammar. Therefore, people who speak different languages perceive the world in different ways. This provocative idea has caused considerable debate over the years.

The relativity hypothesis has two forms, a strong one and a weak one. The strong form states that if a language does not contain a term for a particular concept, there will be no way for people to speaking that language to deal, cognitively with the concept and so people who only speak that language will not be able to deal with that concept at all. The weak form of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (in practice the more common one) retains the idea that the language used in a given culture shapes and directs the experiences and assumptions of that culture, but does not go so far to say that language determines them.

Carmichael et al.

Carmichael, Hogan and Walter (1932), conducted the most famous experiment said to prove the linguistic relativity hypothesis. This classic study demonstrated that the use of language could affect other cognitive processes such as language. There were tow groups of participants and each group was shown the same stimulus figures but given different verbal descriptions of them so for instance, one group might have a stimulus figure described as ‘curtains in a window,’ while the other might have the same figure described as a ‘diamond in a rectangle.’ (See below for examples)

When they were asked to remember the shapes that they had seen Carmichael et al. found that the participants drawings were much more like the verbal description than the original stimulus figures had been. The research participants remembered the figures as being different because of the verbal descriptions that they had. This showed quite clearly that a person’s memory could be changed by the kind of language that is involved. So therefore the implication of the study was that language is a powerful influence on the way we construct the world today.

Levels of Processing Model (Craik and Lockhart)

The levels of processing framework was presented by Craik & Lockhart (1972) as an alternative to theories of memory that postulated separate stages for sensory, working and long-term memory. According to the levels of processing framework, stimulus information is processed at multiple levels simultaneously depending upon its characteristics. Furthermore, the "deeper" the processing, the more that will be remembered. For example, information that involves strong visual images or many associations with existing knowledge will be processed at a deeper level. Similarly, information that is being attended to receives more processing than other stimuli/events. The theory also supports the finding that we remember things that are meaningful to us because this requires more processing than meaningless stimuli.

Processing of information at different levels is unconscious and automatic unless we attend to that level. For example, we are normally not aware of the sensory properties of stimuli, or what we have in working memory, unless we are asked to specifically identify such information. This suggests that the mechanism of attention is an interruption in processing rather than a cognitive process in its own right.

The aim of this study is to prove Carmichael’s theory correct by which is investigating whether labels on ambiguous figures influence how the figures are drawn from memory.