Posted: Nov 27, 2010 10:14 pm
I'd already read about much of the research referenced in the article - the bits about grammatical gender, absolute vs. relative spatial orientation, and some of the stuff on colour and temporal axes, but this bit was new and very interesting:
This neatly confirms that temporal and spatial representation are very tightly linked. The Kuuk Thaayorre use an absolute frame for spatial orientation (cardinal points) and accordingly represent time as running in the direction the Sun takes across the sky.
The author cites research that confirms that language itself causes these differences in speakers' perception. While true in a synchronic perspective, I think this misses half of the question - how did these differences get there in the first place? Some of them do, indeed, boil down to historical accident - as can be seen in the way related languages will assign different genders to the same word - but not all of them (absolute vs. relative spatial frames, expression of causality). I think any answer that goes just from language to cultural perception or from cultural perception to language misses the point - there's a recursive loop between the two. Speakers receive language "from the outside", as it were, as children, and are influenced by it - then they influence it in their turn as active users.
While languages do provide different ways of conceptualising the world, the mother tongue doesn't represent an inescapable mental fate (as some people interpret this kind of findings); we can readily learn new distinctions and relations as encoded in a language different from our own, and these aren't just switched on when we speak that other language either (I regularly find myself wishing I could make a distinction or generalisation in Slovenian I can make in, say, French, or vice versa). I'd love to see more research on this done with multilingual and diglossic speakers.
So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west.
This neatly confirms that temporal and spatial representation are very tightly linked. The Kuuk Thaayorre use an absolute frame for spatial orientation (cardinal points) and accordingly represent time as running in the direction the Sun takes across the sky.
An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of course, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?
The author cites research that confirms that language itself causes these differences in speakers' perception. While true in a synchronic perspective, I think this misses half of the question - how did these differences get there in the first place? Some of them do, indeed, boil down to historical accident - as can be seen in the way related languages will assign different genders to the same word - but not all of them (absolute vs. relative spatial frames, expression of causality). I think any answer that goes just from language to cultural perception or from cultural perception to language misses the point - there's a recursive loop between the two. Speakers receive language "from the outside", as it were, as children, and are influenced by it - then they influence it in their turn as active users.
While languages do provide different ways of conceptualising the world, the mother tongue doesn't represent an inescapable mental fate (as some people interpret this kind of findings); we can readily learn new distinctions and relations as encoded in a language different from our own, and these aren't just switched on when we speak that other language either (I regularly find myself wishing I could make a distinction or generalisation in Slovenian I can make in, say, French, or vice versa). I'd love to see more research on this done with multilingual and diglossic speakers.