Language affecting the way you think

[count_zero]

An article on cracked.com takes a light look at the way words shape the way we think

http://www.cracked.com/article_18823_5-insane-ways-words-can-control-your-mind.html

Mandarin speakers, on the other hand, imagine time in a vertical sense. They'll sometimes talk about whether an event was "up" (already happened) or "down" (coming up in the future). The difference appears to relate back to how their text runs -- English reads from left to right, but Chinese text used to read vertically from top to bottom (and still does in some parts of the world). So it became second nature in the language to picture events unfolding in the same direction as in a story they were reading.

Now here's where it gets weird: They did an experiment at Stanford where they'd try to trip up this process by taking Mandarin speakers and having them arrange objects horizontally in a certain order, then asked them a series of time-based questions ("Does April come before or after March?").

The act of getting them thinking horizontally with the object puzzle made it harder for them to answer the time-based questions. Take an English speaker and make them do a puzzle where they have to stack objects vertically, and they'll then find it harder to answer the same questions having to do with chronology. In other words: Make them think in the wrong physical direction, and they find it harder to think about time.

I can't help thinking that most of the research was based this article from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=2&src=me&ref=homepage

Anyway, I'm interested in how speaking English vs Mandarin might affect the way we think - articles, research or personal experiences.

And is this forum the best place to post such a question?

[liuzhou]

Ah the good old Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis still refuses to die down. It usually fades away under close scrutiny, or pales to near insignificance, but it yet bounces back. 

Personally, I think it is nonsense. If it were true, everyone who spoke the same mother tongue would think in the same way, which they clearly don't.

[Ah-Bin]

I remember reading something about the inability to express hypothetical situations in Chinese having an effect on Chinese speaking people's thought patterns. Anyway, the root of all such debates lies in whether you accept the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or not, here's the wikipedia introduction to it

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

BTW in the parts of the Chinese world that didn't have their traditional culture beaten out of them by a certain regime, they still write from top to bottom fairly frequently.

Well hello Liuzhou Laowai, you beat me to it! (BTW I used to post on your comments page as Waiguolao sometimes when I was staying in Liuzhou, great blog!)

[count_zero]

> I remember reading something about the inability to express hypothetical situations in Chinese having an effect on Chinese speaking people's thought patterns.

In The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, perhaps.

[liuzhou]

In The Language Instinct by Steven Pinker, perhaps

Certainly not. Pinker is 120% against the whole concept of linguistic relativity. In the wonderful "The Language Instinct" he rips it to shreds.

Yes, I remember Waiguolao! Thank you for your kind comment on the blog.

[minue622]

Personally,I'm skeptical of any kinds of Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis things, but your argument fails to refute it.

Smoking ususally affects(or cause)one's odds of having cancer, but it does not mean all the smokers would have the same chance of developing cancer.

[liuzhou]

 Now we have moved to the Tortured Analogies Hypothesis?   

[gato]

Can you even find two people who are exactly the same except for their language ability to test out this hypothesis?

It seems that language is so tied together with the other aspects of culture and life experience that it's hard to separate it from other factors.

[minue622]

liuzhou/ You still don't see what went wrong with your argument.

Here are two prepositions.

1) Language affects the way you think.

2) Everyone who speak the same mother tongue would think in the same way.

The point is that preposition 2) does not necessarily follow from Preposition 1).

[count_zero]

Here is the part of "The Language Instinct" I think Ah-Bin was talking about when he/she said "I remember reading something about the inability to express hypothetical situations in Chinese having an effect on Chinese speaking people's thought patterns"

---

Bloom wrote stories containing sequences of implications from a counterfactual premise and gave them to Chinese and American students. For example, one story said, in outline, 'Bier was an eighteenth-century European philosopher. There was some contact between the West and China at that time, but very few works of Chinese philosophy had been translated. Bier could not read Chinese, but if he had been able to read Chinese, he would have discovered B; what would have influenced him would have been C; once influenced by that Chinese perspective, Bier would have done D," and so on. The subjects were then asked to check off whether B, C, or D actually occurred. The American students gave the correct answer, no, 98% of the time; the Chinese students gave the correct answer only 7% of the time! Cloom concluded that the Chinese language renders its speakers unable to entertain hypothetical false worlds without great mental effort [...]

The cognitive psychologists Terry Au, Yohtaro Takano, and Lisa Liu were not exactly enchanted by these tales of the concreteness of the Oriental mind. Each one identified serious flaws in Bloom's experiments. One problem was that his stories were written in stilted Chinese. Another was that some of the science stories turned out, upon careful reading, to be genuinely ambiguous. Chinese college students tend to have more science training than American students, and thus they were better at detecting the ambiguities that Bloom himself missed. When these flaws were fixed, the differences vanished.

[roddy]

Apparently there's a tribe in the highlands of Indonesia which doesn't have a word for 'Sapir-Whorf' . . .

[liuzhou]

liuzhou/ You still don't see what went wrong with your argument.

Probably because I don't smoke.

[count_zero]

So no one has any examples of this from their own life?

Doesn't have to be stellar.