Lera Boroditsky, How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think

join me giving us strong Santa Fe bienvenido al arab lord if t so i'll be talking to you about language and i'll be doing it using language of course because i can and this is one of these magical abilities that we humans have we can plant ideas in each other's modern using a finite set of words that we recombine into an infinite set of new meaning right so what I'm doing right now is I'm producing tones and hisses and puffs with my mouth while exhaling and those are creating air vibrations that are travelling toward view impinging on your eardrums vibrating your eardrums and then from those vibrations your brain is reconstituting that signal into thoughts I hope and what what that means is I can plant all kinds of weird ideas in your mind using language right so I can say imagine an ovulating zebra riding on the back of our i na stress while solving differential equations now if everything has gone relatively well in your life so far you haven't had that thought before that's a new thought and I just implanted it in your head using language so this is a very powerful tool that we humans have but of course you don't have just one language there least 7,000 languages spoken than there have been many more spoken in the past in the world and language is different from one another in the kinds of things they require from their speakers just in order to be able to speak the language grammatically let's start with a hypothetical example so you you can tell why it's hypothetical let's just focus on that verb read the most hypothetical part now if I were to say this in English I have to change the verb to mark that this is something that happened in the past right so if it's something that will be in the future I would say well reader is reading if it's happening now there are some languages that like English require tense on verbs but there's some languages that don't do 25 verbs at all the verb never changes so an Indonesian for example it would always be the same form of a verb in some languages they require tense but they're much more specific about what they require so for example in me on this is a language spoken in Papua New Guinea they're five different past tenses so depending on how long ago something occurred you would change the tense of the verb it just happened as opposed to within a couple of weeks within a month and so on Sons of languages in addition to tense require gender on verbs right so if it was Melania that did the reading in Russian for example my native language it would be a different form of the verb than if it was Donald in Russian also used to change the depending on whether the action was completed in some sense so let's say was Donald he read the whole thing from cover to cover that would be one form with the verb but if he skimmed it or he picked it up and didn't finish it or he's still in the process that would be a different form of the verb in a lot of languages you have to change the verb depending on how you came to know about this information this is called evidential information you have to mark your evidence so if this is something you witnessed with your own eyes that would be one form of the verb but if it's just something you've heard about or you inferred that would be a different form as a verb and again languages differ in the kinds of evidence they require people to mark so in some languages you have to distinguish between something you heard as opposed to something you saw as opposed to something you inferred from vision or inferred from sound or inferred from something that someone says I'm selling and many distinctions possible now languages of course for not just the stuff they require at first but in all kinds of stuff so if I just want to tell you where I live and I want to say oh it's a blue house the left of the big tree as soon as we try to start translating this into any language we read into problem so for example some languages don't have number words so there's no way to say precisely 7 and some languages don't have a word that corresponds to the English blue some languages will have only a couple of color words some languages will have a single word that covers blue and green some languages will be mutt will require people to be more precise and distinguish between light blue and dark blue for example in some languages you can't say left of because words like left and right aren't used and instead everything gets put into some kind of absolute directions like north south east west space so I would have to say I live in houses northwest of the big tree of volcano word or c-word from the big tree so then I have to of course know where the volcano is and where to see is relative to my house and lots of languages there isn't a generic word for tree instead you have to be more specific you have to say what kind of tree is that eucalyptus is it a red cypress and so on and because we're inside to say I want to give you a Swann example which I love you don't have to read the whole slide but these are Navajo verb stems for different modes of consumption so different kinds of ways that you could be eating things and Navajo verbs are just exquisite and the kind of information they encode and require but here for example at the very bottom is a distinction I love it's a distinction between drinking something from a bottle as opposed to from a glue right so in English if you say I drank beer yesterday that doesn't seem incomplete seems like you said something that was perfectly fine but in Navajo you would have had to distinguish on the mode of drinking what did something from it open or closed continue ok so when people have considered these kinds of differences one intuitive idea is well of course speakers of different languages have to think differently because what languages are requiring our speakers to pay attention to such different information just in order to be able to speak but on the other side people have argued you know just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently because it could be that everyone pays attention to all the same things everyone remembers all the same things but just chooses different elements to talk about so for example if I tell you it rained this morning which i think is true you don't think oh boy but she didn't mention that it only rained outside not inside this room so she must not know that we all whenever you utter a sentence you're only uttering a tiny proportion of the information you know about the scenario right so if I speak a language of the doesn't mark tense or if I speak a language that doesn't mark evidence or if I speak a language that doesn't distinguish different modes of drinking maybe I still encode that information I still pay attention to it I still know it even though I'm not putting it in the sentences that I produce so this creates a puzzle could it be that everyone is in fact paying attention to all of these things logically that would have to mean that everyone has to pay attention to all of the things that are included in all of the world's languages that's potentially a very large set of things that you have to attend to an encode at any given moment and we know now after many years of psychology and neuroscience work that our attention in memory is very very poor by much more poor than we would like to believe and so that creates a question is it true that speakers of different languages actually attend to the world differently to what extent do language and culture guide what we see in the world now this is a really old question and people have been offering opinions on this question for a really long time so here shallow mom and for the Holy Roman Empire says to have a second language is to have a second soul one of his successors Charles the fifth says a man who knows four languages is worth four men very strong statement something to put on your resume several languages good way for your company to save money and one of their successors Frederick the Great of Prussia had a more specific set of hypotheses he said I speak English to my accountant French to my ambassador it's Howard to my mistress Latin to my god and German to my horse not clear how he came up with a specific set of assignation but this is the sort of thing we've all heard right you've heard that there's some language that's great for romance and there's some other language that's great for reason and there's some other language that's great for argument now there's no empirical evidence that there's such broad category differences I'm sad to say there's no language you can learn that will just automatically make you a great lover there are other things you have to learn apparently now this idea that language shapes thought has come into a lot of popularity and then come into a lot of this dis popularity and dishonor over different time periods so in the 1970s and 80s in cognitive science it became essentially taboo to think about how language might shape the way we think and here's a quote from Jerry Fodor he's a philosopher of mind just expressing just how much he hates this idea he says I hate relativism more than I hate anything else excepting maybe fiberglass powerboats and you can imagine all the reasons he doesn't like power fiberglass power boats but other than that the bane of his existence is this idea that the languages we speak might shape the way we think well so since this quote there has been a lot of new empirical work actually trying to understand do people who speak different languages think differently other than having strong opinions one way or the other can we put some scientific basis under these questions so that's what I want to do today is tell you about some of my favorite examples from the scientific literature so I'll talk about how we think about space time color gender to a limited extent events and blame and punishment and number art with time so I've done a lot of work on how think about time I'm not the only one obsessed with it time is the most frequent now in English and other temporal words like year and day are also in the top 10 and this is a pretty common pattern in European languages people talk a lot about time now there are a couple of things that we used to know when I started working on this about how American English speakers organized time for example it's very natural for people to organize series of events from left to right and it has to do we used to think with how the brain is lateralized so people used to say well people are right-handed a lot of them and the brain is not symmetrical so that's why time has to go from left to right turns out if you read and write a language that goes from right to left like Hebrew Arabic then you'll also organize time from right to left and let me just give you a cute example from advertising this is a a nestle product it's a nutritional supplement for kids and you can read this logo very easily and see what this product does for your child when they started marketing this in Arabic speaking countries they ran into a problem because if you read it from rights list it becomes quite unclear what this product will do to your child now the other thing we used to know about time is that the future is in front and the past is behind and again people aren't made biological arguments for why this had to be the case of course we have faces on the front not in the back we walk forwards usually not backwards so our bodies are asymmetrical on the front back axis that must be why the future is in front but it turns out they're places where the future is not in front so this is work by my colleagues or ourselves minions any Sweetzer they studied the IMR a group that lives in Andes and for the I Amara in their language the future is behind the past is in front and when they looked at the way people gesture the way they move their bodies when they're thinking about the past in the future they actually just her in front of them when talking about the past so you might say that was a long time ago and I gesture behind them when talking about the future and the reason the imy are do this is of course past is known it's manifest you can see it the future is unknown that's why it's behind your head now time doesn't just have to be on the horizontal axis it can acquire new dimensions so for example in Mandarin the past is up and the future is down and in lots of studies and also in observations of gesture you see Mandarin speakers laying out time on this vertical axis in addition to horizontal representation now time also doesn't just have to go relative to the body so this is some work I had a chance to do with an Aboriginal community in Australia these are the cooked hire people on Cape York and they're one of these groups that don't use words like left and right and instead lay everything out in north-south-east-west space so for them you say things like there's an ant on your Southwest leg or move your keys to the north-northwest a little bit in fact the way you say hello and coupe tires to say which way are you heading and the answer should be precise something like north northeast and the far distance how about you right so imagine every time you greet someone as you pass them on the street you have to report your heading direction you would get oriented pretty quickly let's just do an experiment here right now so close your eyes and I can see you so I can tell if you're not a program all right now point southeast okay you can open your eyes I see points here here here here here I don't know which way did importantly I still don't know which way it is from asking you guys so this don't don't feel bad this is completely normal and I asked roomful of Harvard professors MIT professor Stanford professors they do exactly the same thing even if they've been coming to the same room for forty years they still don't know which way southeast is this is normal but in pomp Rao stand next to a five-year-old and say hey can you point southeast and they'll point precisely without hesitation of course I have to get my compass out to check because I can never remember the question we had was given that these folks are able to stay origins in ways that we used to think we're beyond human capability and given that they don't use left and right for space how do they think about time so I took this simple task these are pictures of my grandfather in different ages and I would scramble them put them in a stack and say lay these out on the ground so that they're in the correct order and so I've laid them out here from left to right the way an English speaker would and what would the coop tire do let me show you a little bit of data this is one person they're sitting facing south and these are a bunch of different card sets that they've organized and you can see they've done each one now from left to right here's the same person they're now sitting facing north and now they've laid everything out from right to left here's a different person they're sitting facing east now they've made everything come towards their body what's the pattern from east to west right so of course one way of describing these data is oh how weird every time they turn their body time changes direction but actually a different way of describing the data is to say no actually for them time always goes in the same direction regardless of how they are facing it's for us but time we make time chase us around so if I'm facing this way then time goes this way find facing this way than time goes this way fun this way the next time goes this way very egocentric of me to make the dimension of time shades me around every time I happen to turn my body for them time always goes from east to west so time doesn't have to go with respect to the body you can go with respect to the landscape and also train doesn't even have to go in a straight line so this is work from my colleague Rafael Nunez history of the youth no this is a group in Papua New Guinea and for the youb no time rolls into the village at one angle and then once it hits the village it takes a turn and rolls out of the village at a different angle and that has to do with where the source in the mouth of the yuca River are these are important locations for the youth no and so they are just not concerned with the fact that time needs to be linear to them it doesn't need to do in here now we can ask across all of these cross linguistic differences how do we know that language is creating the difference and how people think about time and of course when you compare people from radically different cultures it may be that language is giving it a clue but it may be also lots of other cultural practices and artifacts that create those differences that we observe an experiment so one thing that we can always do is bring the studies into the lab and teach people new ways to talk about time so bring english-speaking and college students into the lab and teach them new metaphors teach them the Mandarin metaphors for time for example and then after they've learned to talk in this new way we can test them again and see if they start it started thinking a little bit like Mandarin speakers and that's actually exactly what happens when you teach people to talk a new way you're teaching them to think a new way as well and so that tells us that language has this causal power you can change how people think by changing how they talk let's to color so of course the world provides us with a continuous spectrum of color and our languages break up this color spectrum into discrete categories some languages have only a couple of words for color light and dark or cold and warm some languages have many more words for color and where language is placed boundaries between colors differs from language to language so let me give you one example from Russia so in Russian things that we call blue in English can't be put under one label so there's a separate word in Russian for light blue go avoid and dark blue singing and so in studies you can ask does that mean that Russian speakers think of these two colors is being more different is it easier for Russian speakers to visually distinguish those two colors than it is for English speakers colors that span the boundary the answer is yes and this is true across any comparison that you can make across languages so English speakers are better able to distinguish blue from green than speakers of languages that don't make that distinction and the same is because Korea and Korean makes a cool distinction in the yellow green space that English doesn't make and so it's easier for Korean speakers to make that distinction visually than it is pretty much because here's another funny thing that language does language creates categories sometimes out of thin air so in languages like Spanish many European languages all noun are of a particular grammatical gender so who here speaks the language with grammatical gender expand where everything is masculine or feminine a lot of you one thing that's important is that these genders differ across languages right so for example the Sun is feminine in German masculine in Spanish the moon is a scaling in German feminine and exactly the opposite there doesn't seem to be much rhyme or reason to how these genders are assigned and in fact many humorous have written about their difficulties in learning languages grammatical genders so Mark Twain wrote an essay called the awful German language where basically he's writing about how the language makes no sense partially because of this grammatical gender system and David Sedaris and we talk pretty one-day talks about his difficulty learning grammatical genders in French and he eventually solved this problem by only ever referring to things in the plural so yes you have to toaster he just has to buy two toasters because you can't stand the embarrassment of getting the gender wrong so the question is once you've learned a language like this with grammatical gender do you actually end up thinking of the Sun and the moon is somehow more male like or more female like depending on what gender they are in your language now I'm going to point out that if you speak a language and dramatical gender this is an incredibly pervasive feature so here again is an example from Russian in Russian words of different genders have different sounds you it's with them use different adjective endings different pronouns and possessive even different verb endings so let's say you want to say something simple like my chair was white in Russian well you'd have to use the masculine form of my then you have the word chair which has a masculine sounding ending and then you have the masculine form of one and the masculine form of white now you've just said a simple thing about a chair but you've marked the masculinity of that chair four times in four words right and actually if you were to continue this in the next sentence and not even mention the word chair but I and it was all so comfortable you would have to continue to agree to continue to make it all but with something feminine like if it was a stool then you'd have to make it all feminine the language like this a lot of opportunity to forget what grammatical gender SIG's are it's an incredibly pervasive part of the system or to give you a sense of what it would feel like to see an object as masculine or feminine when you're seeing it in different languages is an example from a memoir of a Russian boy learning French from his grandmother's so he's looking at a flower and thinking about it either in Russian where it's masculine or in French with feminine so he says as a child that absorbed all the sounds of Charlotte's language French I swam in them without wondering why that glint in the grass that said colored sent his living brilliance sometimes existed in the masculine and had a crunchy fragile crystal and identity imposed achieved by one of its names she took that's the rush for flour masculine and was sometimes enveloped in a velvety seven felt like or becoming Fleur Frenchman flower feminine so here he's giving you this really vivid sense of looking at the same object and experiencing it differently with different grammatical genders of course you could ask is this something that only happens to the Russian boys learning French from their grandmother or is this something that happens to general folks regular folks and in fact people have done a lot of studies looking at how people perceive and think about objects depending on the grammatical gender so in some studies researchers ask kids to give voices to animated characters so they tell kids we're making an animated movie we need your help what voice should this toaster have and the kids have to assign a voice and kids who are learning Spanish or French as their first language very early on started finding voices that are appropriate to the grammatical gender in their language if you ask people describe a bridge so give me three adjectives that describe a bridge and you could do this with bilingual so they're doing it in English and people will give you different adjectives depending on the grammatical gender so they might give more stereotypical adjectives like beautiful elegant if it's feminine and strong towering if it's masculine there's some evidence suggesting that hurricanes that happen to get female names these names of course are randomly assigned two hurricanes are more deadly because people don't evacuate when they're told to because they underestimate the potential striction of these hurricane just true actually even if you're Hurricane Katrina and some of the other most dense from the set and you can also see this in art so this is an effect you can see with your own eyes when you look at a personification in art if a painter or sculptor has decided to portray death or time or truth or justice in a work of art how do they decide if that's going to be a man or a woman well it turns out about 78% of the time you can dict the gender and the personification from the gender in the artist native language let me just show you a couple of my favorite examples here's Michelangelo's time of times of day so you have the dawn a day the dusk and the night and you can see all of these agree with grammatical genders in Italian now the other thing that language does for us is such construe and construct events so events in the world look very complicated and even simple events are complicated and I know that sounds nonsensical but here's what I mean take this example Dick Cheney a few years ago goes out hunting with his buddy hit Harry Whittington who happens to be a lawyer and Cheney shoots Whittington accidentally in the face so there are many different ways that we could describe this event but it's a very simple event it doesn't take a long time to shoot someone in the face of the split-second event and also it's a simple physical event it's not like oh the collapse of the global economy or global warming or any one of these more complex events where the many agents acting overtime in many causal loops it's not like that it's it's really simple and yet we have many many different ways we could think about it and describe it so this is the way the European hair will describe the event they said Cheney bags lawyer suggests he went out hunting for lawyers and he got one now who are canonically in English you could say Cheney shot Whittington or you could say Whittington got shot by Cheney that removes Cheney a little bit out of it you could just say Whittington got shot leaving Cheney out of it all together you can use more vivid verbs so in Texas the newspaper said things like Whittington got peppered pretty good so you can bring a little flavor to your description this is what Cheney interview where he was good taking full responsibility for the event he said ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry and you can talk about all the other conditions that exist at the time but that's the bottom line and no it was not Harry's fault that's very nice of him but look at that first sentence he says ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit Harry so this is a split second event but he makes it into a chain of four events right and he just happens to be on one end of that log chain but this is something language allows us to do I can say with the roam or we cured polio and that's one verb for those very complicated protracted events or I can use four verbs to say I shot my friend in the face in fact whenever you're choosing a verb you're taking a perspective on how much time you're going to compact into an event what makes an event bush did one better he said he heard a bird flush and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get wounded that is a masterful exultation here Cheney transforms from agent to mere witness by the end of a single sentence of course the onion always has the best headlines they said White has had prior knowledge of Cheney threat August briefing warned Cheney determined to shoot old man in the face now I'm giving you these examples obviously some of them are jokes but just to show how many options we have in how we construe even relatively simple events and languages and not only allow us a lot of these options but they also differ from one another in what's canonical and how you normally would describe an event so let me tell you about one difference and in English we have this quite weird property in English in that we don't strongly distinguish between things that are accidents and things that are intentional so in both of these cases whether someone you know took a nice good swing and really smashed the vase as opposed to someone who accidentally causes a vase to break it's perfectly fine to say he broke the vase in fact in English you can even say things like I broke my arm now in lots of languages you can't say that unless you're a lunatic and you went out looking to break your arm and you succeeded because that construction of I did something suggest that you did it intentionally that was your goal and so you would instead say something like the vase broke my arm broke it so happened that the vase broke on me or something like that they spoke itself there'd be some way to grammatically distinguish that it wasn't intentional so Spanish is a language like this makes more of a distinction between accidents and intentional events and they're two interesting differences to observe here one is English isn't strongly distinguishing between accidents and intentional actions but Spanish is only talking about who did it when it's intentional when it's accidental less so you're less likely to mention that someone did something you more likely just to talk about the outcome so does that make a difference for the kinds of things that people attend to and remember when they witness events themselves so we set up a little a little game in the lab where we showed people videos of events that were either intentional or accidental so here's an example of an intentional action okay clear and here's an accidental version of that okay and then after people saw a whole bunch of these videos different crimes against pencils and balloons and so on and we said okay earlier you saw one of these guys do something with a balloon which of these two fellows was and half of the actions were performed by one and half of the actions were performed by the other so this is like a police lineup like eyewitness memory lineup can you remember who did it and what we find is that when the actions are intentional everyone remembers who did it speakers of English Spanish Japanese people are really good at remembering who did it in this task when the action is accidental it's the English speakers who are the champions English speakers are still really strongly paying attention to who did it they're the ones who describe the action is he popped the balloon he broke the pencil but if you change the question and instead ask do you remember if it was an accident now it's the English speakers who don't look so hot now it's the Spanish speakers who remember if it was an accident and the English speakers because they were paying so much attention to who did it didn't encode as strongly whether or not it was an accident so there's a trade-off there's only so much stuff that we can pay attention to and what we see here are speakers of different languages witness exactly the same event but come away remembering different things about that event now again we always want to ask how do we know that language is causal how do we know that language can create this difference in what people remember and so one way to do that is to bring English speakers in and bombard them with one kind of language or another so we bring English speakers in and we either bombard them with non agentive language like the match blew out the toast burned and so on or we give them the agentive versions like she burnt the toast she unfastened the necklace and so on so these are all events that are unrelated to what they're going to see in the videos then they see the videos just as before and again we ask them who did it the first time and what we find is if you've just abarnes the necklace unfastened the paint splatter this is not agentive language they start paying less attention to who did it if you've bombarded them with she burned the toast she unfastened the necklace they pay more attention to who did it right so the kind of language that swims around you the for the grammatical forms that swim around your nerd in your environment change what you attend to even when you're looking at new events unrelated to what you've just been hearing about now I want to switch to how we think about number now number is such a fascinating case because we tend to think of mathematics as this universal language right so often when I teach about language and culture to my undergraduates I start out by asking them what is culture and they come up with all kinds of answers and then I ask okay well what is not culture and then they scratch their heads for a while and they argue amongst themselves and eventually at least one group will say math math is an odd culture because it's universal it's you know given by God or some some some force outside of human minds and what I always like to remind people is that the system of math we use now of course is a relatively recent human invention or discovery as you want to think about it the decimal positional system that we use it only really took root in Europe in the 1700s it started earlier in India and the Arab world but there are all kinds of other different kinds of number systems in the world that are not decimal not base-10 the way that we use so for example here's a system for Papua New Guinea it's a body based system and its base 27 so you start counting with a finger on one hand and you go across your body and when you get to the pinky finger on the other hand that's 27 and the names of these body parts of the names for the numbers so if you want eight potatoes you ask for elbow potatoes for example right now languages differ in these base systems the body is a very common source so there are many languages that use base five base ten base 20 you can imagine why we have five fingers ten fingers in your count both hands 20 if you find if you count your toes warm places you can see them so these are very very common but you also get systems that are based 12 often because of the joints counting the joints and your fingers so there are four fingers and three joints on each and you could use the Selma's the counter so you have your base 12 system base eight systems and then you have these kinds of wild systems that it could be base 81 and some Papua New Guinean languages some languages have binary as their as their mode of computation in them and then some languages don't have numbers at all so this is a famous example from the Amazon these are the piraha and they don't have exact number at all so there's no word like seven in the phone which there's not even an exact word for one and one thing that researchers have wondered does that make a difference for how the piraha able to do even basic numerical tasks so here the researcher laid out a number of spools of thread and they've asked the participant to lay out the same number of balloons make it the same as the instruction and you can see that the participants struggles here and of course anyone can make a mistake but the kinds of errors and how quickly the errors grow as the numbers grow suggests that what the parihar are doing is not counting at all they're not able to keep track of exact numbers the way that we do instead they're approximating and when you're approximating the size of your errors gets bigger as the size of the things you need to approximate gets bigger and you see this very clear signature approximation and how they do these tests now of course it's always really problematic to compare people across such vastly different cultures right so the control group for the piraha who are a hunter-gatherer group in Amazon was a set of MIT undergraduates all right now you can imagine probably a couple of reasons for why MIT undergraduates might look different on a math task then just about anyone else you know pick any other group of people in the world and so of course I'm being a little glib the experiments are more controlled in that but you always want to know how much is language specifically contributing to a pattern that you see in cognition and one of the best examples of that comes from studies of deaf signers in Nicaragua so that these are folks who are living in a very numerate culture alright so here's a street scene from Manaus these folks write buses and they use money and they are living in families that speak and use numbers all the time but some of them have never learned a language that has a number system alright so they're specifically deficient in this linguistic input of having number words in their vocabulary and what you find is that people deaf signers who haven't learned a set of number words in there I've never been exposed to number words in their sign aren't able to do with these very basic kind of matching number matching tasks just like you see with the piraha and the thing is they know they're missing something so they know that when they go to the store and they give money to someone that person somehow magically knows how much money to give back right and they just don't know how they know that right it's just this magical cognitive ability that other people have that they don't have and for me the way to think about it is I have a lot of friends who are very good at improvising music or you know composing on the fly and I know they're good because when they do it it sounds good and if I tried to do that it would sound terrible and I have no idea how they do it it's to me it's this magical thing that they just open their mouth and it sounds good and I have no idea how they're doing it so that's the way I think about this that there's you know that there's something that you're missing and you just have no idea how to get entry into that system in this case what they're missing is this cultural system of number words that was developed and refined over many many generations and that we now take completely for granted because we learned it so long ago we were kids we don't remember learning it and yet it gave us entry into this whole world of number and math and in our culture of course there's nothing that's created without math right so there's nothing in this room that was created without math and if if you like puzzles I'm going to show this also at the end of the talk so you can you can take it home oh well you'll see it better at the end of the talk okay so these are the things we've talked about how people think about space and time and color and number now of course we all to some extent know that what you call something is important right because we argue about it all the time and often there are dire consequences to what you call someone or something so do we call people Patriots or activists or terrorists the same group of people can be called these three different things and they'll be treated very differently does the US government sponsor torture or just enhanced interrogation techniques did Bill and Monica have sex the definition of this word was one of the turning points for the case of impeachment of Bill Clinton um do we talk about lies or falsehoods and Mis statements or alternative facts again where we're parsing these kinds of differences now very strongly and outside of these more grave decisions there are lots of decisions that we make that may be less important but nonetheless still her deal this relationship between language and thought so for example a few years ago to California prune board petitioned the FDA to allow them to change the product their name of their product from prunes to dried plums now this cost them millions of dollars to do why would they do such a thing well prunes the word prune lived in a bad linguistic neighborhood right so imagine that what what what prunes associated with of course old-age constipation you know bring cleanness things that young Californians don't want to think about when they're buying their snacks but dried plums well dried plums live in a great linguistic neighborhood they're friends with what like dried Kiwis dried apricots things you take with you on a hike right and so they bet that if you renamed prunes into dried plums which is of course what they are people would be more excited to buy them and in fact they were right dried plums started selling better than prunes eventually they actually had to sell prunes and dried plums side-by-side because older people wanted the prunes and then several years after that they had to combine the packaging and now it says both prunes and dried plums is but it's gone through a lot of transformation okay now again I want to point out that we always want to ask can language really be causal in shaping how we think can language really shape thinking and and I want to just remind you of the ways that we try to establish relationship one way is to train people to talk in new ways and show that that changes how they think and other way is to take language away so I didn't tell you about these kind of studies but you can disrupt people's ability to naturally use language by giving them some set of words to repeat over and over again for example and when you do that you can disrupt a whole lot of other cognitive processing and change the way people behave and tasks that we used to think we're completely non linguistic you can ask people to switch languages so take bilinguals and test them in one language or another and show that they think differently depending on what language they're being tested in what linguistic environment they're in at the moment so to bring this all together of course our languages and cultures make us super smart we inherit so much knowledge that's been built over thousands of generations of our predecessors our systems of metaphors for space and time our number systems are ways of attending to impartial anout events all of these are cognitive tools that have been built by our predecessors over many many generations these of useful guide books to the world ways of compressing the infinite amount of information you would otherwise need to figure out how to address so that these are incredibly useful tools but on the other hand cultures also reduce cognitive entropy what I mean by that is we are able to think about the world and conceptualize the world in many many many different ways but we usually don't do all of those different ways right we never think to look about how we could think about things differently we just do things the way that we're used to doing them in our languages in our cultures once you get into one of those trenches you don't think to kind of dig out of the trench and see how what other possibilities are the fact that there are so many languages and they differ so much this linguistic diversity is a real testament to the ingenuity in the sophistication and the flexibility of the human mind we're able to invent not one perspective on the world but seven thousands and many more because we're constantly changing the language inventing language moving moving things in new directions so I want to leave you with this thought about thinking about linguistic diversity as as this aspiration to thinking about how you could think about things differently what are all the different things that your mind can do now of course not every time that you try to change what something is called is it going to have the desired effect right and we can all think of cases where it fails completely so here's an example where the US Congress decided to rename french fries into freedom fries by an official act of Congress this was because France would not join our Coalition of the Willing to go to Iraq and this was our punishment to them it also affected freedom toast now this is not new for example during World War one things that had a German founding name got renamed so we had Liberty cabbage and Liberty sausage and Liberty pops that obviously did not stick and it's also not something that's specific to America so for example in Iran after the Danish newspaper published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad they renamed the Danish pastry into tears of the Prophet Muhammad pizzas were renamed into elastic loaves and so on so this is a very common technique around the world and it's equally unsuccessful everywhere that it's tried and there's a really clear technical reason for why that is usually words in language that are synonyms that you can just replace one for the other our words that are interchangeable right so post mail and Mail postman and mailman in English you can use them in all of the same contexts so if you can just pluck a word out and replace it with another word without any other changes that suggests that these words are very close and meaning with their synonyms so let's take this to its logical conclusion we have freedom fries and freedom toast and then freedom poodles freedom kissing freedom manicures but then what should we call France Freedomland and what should we call French the language of freedom of course you start out trying to say the France and freedom are somehow anti sydejko that's the point of the substitution but what you're in fact doing is equating them the logical conclusion is that France and freedom are synonymous so I would propose that that if we really want to annoy the French and it seems like nationalism is in our future use the principles of science and take the things that the French hate and call them French so for example and ketchup could become French sauce McDonald's be the French cafe monogamy would be the French relationship Disneyland would be spread Americans would be French people English language would be called French and so on thank you very much so I promised you a puzzle to take home for homework and here's one you can take a picture of it if you like this is from a real language spoken still in the world today and what you have on the left here is the given set so those are the number words that would be used to call out those particular numbers so that's the word for five and the word for nine and so on and your job is to figure out what are the number words that what are the numbers that are being named by those words and how would you write down these numbers in in this language I'm not going to tell you which language it is because then you can cheat so do it do this with a friend and you'll need a piece of paper that's very hard to do without a piece of paper so enjoy well I'd like to find out what you say is absolutely fascinating but how does it affect the translator UN for instance when they have to translate from one of these languages to the other how can they possibly cope with it give an accurate translation well the problem of translation in the UN is actually much worse than we used just outlined because they have to go across many many languages and they don't have pairwise translators for each pair so for example is the Lithuanian representative is talking and the Greek representative is listening they don't have a direct Lithuanian to Greek translator they have to go through some other language so there might be a Lithuanian French translator and then a French Greek translator and so by the time you get get the message you can imagine how many ways it has changed of course the translators are highly trained and they're incredibly dedicated people but it is impossible to achieve exact translation across any two languages even closely related ones so a lot of a lot of errors and a lot of differences necessarily will be introduced and hopefully these can be resolved in discussion but you know communication between any two people even who speaks the same language still has a lot of problems right so I don't know if you were married but most married people have experienced this and one of my favorite quotes from George Bernard Shaw is that he says the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred we all we all believe we've made ourselves perfectly clear and then somehow 20 years later you discover you met what how could this have been so it's an enormous problem so the question is are there any areas of universality and if so where so depending on the level at which you define universality there of course things that you find across all languages so a basic one is all human languages must be learn about by humans right so they all share this property right this there's no human language that's not learn about by humans they all have to be useful in some way for communication they have to allow people to continue to exist procreate and pass on the language so at that level their absolute Universal they're also some really common properties that languages have whether or not they're complete universals or not you're going to find them in lots and lots of languages for example all languages that I know of distinguish up from down because all humans that I know of live in places that are subject to gravity and so you know it's a really useful clear asymmetry in the world and most humans pick that up and distinguish it in some way but then once you get to things that more abstract or more removed from direct physical experience lots and lots of differences can arise and even things that are very tied to physical experience like a colour or representations of space humans have found different ways of conceptualizing and structuring them so there are certainly strong general tendencies across languages that are driven by physics by physiology human bodies are really similar across the world and so on but within those similarities people still find incredible latitude to create their conceptual universe anyone and perhaps poetry that develops the brain it's a wonderful question there's a little bit there some suggestions that reading fiction improves improves your theory of mind so theory of mind is this ability to read other people's minds and in further intentions and think about what it is and it might be thinking of course there are some kinds of fiction that's especially geared towards that right so if you're reading a lot of Jane Austen it's all about thinking about what other people might think and how other people might perceive you and so it's giving you a lot of practice in thinking about other people's minds it's early days for that kind of that kind of research but at least there's a suggestion that that happened in general the more broad your set of experiences is whether it's through lived experience or through experience with reading the more flexible and open-minded you seem to become so for example people who have lived in multiple places around the world score better on tests of creativity tests of just being able to think outside the box and this makes sense if you're exposed to lots of different ways of doing things you're then disinhibited from thinking that there's only one way to do it the right way the way that your culture does it and instead you might be more free to explore other ways babies born able to speak one language better than another I mean total learn one language better than another well so by the time babies are born they've already experienced a lot of the language they're surrounded by by hearing the sounds through the womb and we know this because when infants are born they respond more strongly to the sound patterns of their language as opposed to languages that have different sound patterns so if your language has a particular melody they will respond to languages that have that melody more strongly than languages that have other melodies well if your language makes a particular set of phonological distinctions respond more to those than those of other languages so except in very rare cases there are no in you know for example if an infant is born death of course they haven't had that experience but except for those rare cases inference by the time they're born they're no longer pre-linguistic they've already been language right they've are they've been experiencing language even before they can open their eyes and see the world and that early experience is already conditioned them to the sounds and the patterns in their language they start learning very early but in principle of course a baby born into any culture can learn the language of that culture some languages take longer to perfect than others so Slavic languages for example are terrible they have all this extra marketing and it takes kids until they're about 12 or 13 to start really having adult level proficiency with case marking and gender marking and aspect marking and all of the different things that you have to do with Slavic verbs and other languages kids will achieve adult-like proficiency earlier so it depends on specific complexities of your language it may take longer to get adult light proficiency do you think that the different ways people use the language now by texting is changing the way they think it's a wonderful question so you know people are always using language in new ways right language has never been static it's a living thing and the one thing that has been common throughout history is that older people complain about how younger people are killing the language and soon there will be no more language left because of the kids these days right so and people have worried about language being destroyed by all kinds of things so there were serious arguments that the invention of the printing press was going to destroy language the English language the Norman Conquest was going to destroy language teenagers in all generations were always about to destroy the English language language continues changing and evolving and that's that's its nature it's a living it's a living thing that we create and so whether it's through technology or through being exposed to new experiences that's just always going to happen so yes people are definitely changing the language part of that is driven by technology but this is nothing new that we don't know exactly right so I haven't done an experiment to find out but the way I would start asking that question is by saying is there something systematically structurally different about the way that you use language and text as opposed to in spoken language so is there some pattern that you would specifically predict because if it's just an abbreviated form of language it may not it may not lead to interesting differences so I would want to look for what is structurally different in texting as opposed to in speaking do you have an opinion rather of you informed by research or not on whether with the ascendance of American English in the 20th century relative domination of the culture whether it's had an impact on the way people with a Nam who for whom English is a second or third or fourth language well there it's impacted the way that they conceive of things they think that's a great question so we have actually done work like this looking at bilingual to learn English as their second language both looking at how they change the way they think in their native language and even the way they speak their native language and also the way bilinguals change the way they not change the way they speak English but change English through the way that they speak in because of the things they're bringing from their first language so let me give you an example of the first kind we looked at Indonesian speakers who have learned English and Indonesian is one of these languages that doesn't mark tense on verbs in English of course does an Indonesian speakers complain about learning English and say why do you why are you so obsessed with when things happen and how do you have to change these verbs and in general anything that you don't mark in your language and then all of a sudden you have to start doing it is really annoying right whether it's grammatical gender or anything else you just think why are these people so obsessed with it so this is their reaction to each but then when we look at their speaking Indonesian they actually start putting a lot more time information in their Indonesian so the way they speak their native language changes as a function in 'wish and we also see the effects going in the opposite direction so sometimes people come from a language that makes more distinction and then they try to bring those distinctions into English and speak a kind of richer version of English so we often think of second language speakers as speaking some kind of reduced or maybe like versions of the language but sometimes it turns out they're speaking a more fancy version so for example I said Russian has this awful system with verbs where you have to mark all kinds of things and English doesn't is not so strict with those requirements and so when we get our Russian English bilinguals to speak in English we find that they'll make all these really fancy constructions that native English speakers don't make because the Russian speakers is trying to preserve the distinctions from Russian so English speakers might be happy to say she drank the wine regarde list of whether all of the wine was gone we're Russian speakers will say she was drugged all of the wine or she was drinking one I'll try I'll try to say something more fancy to preserve this distinction of important aggression so you get influences going both ways can you share any corollaries of your research with a kinematic language like sign on ASL or dance yeah so sign languages of course are natural human languages and I didn't I only touched on sign when I talked about number but there are people who study different sign languages around the world of course there there are many different ones and they're not mutually understandable between them and there are all kinds of cognitive effects that people have studied from being a China so for example your ability to pay attention and allocate attention visual space improves because you have to coordinate you have to look at the person's face and also look at their hands and so you get a lot of practice doing that so when you learn to sign your ability to visually distribute attention gets better and of course then there also all these structural properties of signs are interesting I want to give you one example about kind of a cool difference in maybe in translation between a spoken language and a sign language so a lot of science even in very developed sign languages are still somewhat iconic so for example aside for eating and American Sign Language is like this that I might be getting it a little bit wrong in the details but it's something like this so it's kind of an ingestion sign and of course we use the word to eat in English we extended in all kinds of metaphorical ways so we can say the acid ate through the shoe right where it's not really an ingestion anymore it's more of a disintegration and so in American Sign Language you can't really use this sign to say the acid ate through the shoe and instead it gets translated more like this sign which is kind of a nibble and so it has it has to go into some other physical form so just an example of where you have to solve a translation in a particular way it has to do with the modality because the sign is so iconic it just carries so much extra meaning of this extra meaning of ingestion you have to do something else for these metaphorical extensions please join me in thinking [Applause]

Channel: SAR School for Advanced Research

Views: 50,217

Rating: 4.8950682 out of 5

Keywords: School for Advanced Research, SAR, Lera Boroditsky, Language, thoughts, causality, agency

Id: iGuuHwbuQOg

Length: 64min 3sec (3843 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2017