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How learning languages affects our brain

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How learning languages affects our brain

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EPALE

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Speaking a foreign language is always useful but learning a new language can be a difficult task. There are so many weird rules, unfamiliar words and pronunciation problems that most of the time you believe that you'll never learn anything. It is easy to feel discouraged and to give up. But, the truth is that you are catching up faster than you believe and soon you will manage to master it and become a real expert. Or at least you'll learn enough to order a tea next time you are visiting the country whose language you are learning. Not only does learning languages have ability to transform social aspects of your life but it can also affect your brain. The How Learning Languages Affects Our Brain Infographic showcases the consequences of learning a language and the pretty epic impact it has on your brain!

We need to make mental fitness a huge part of our everyday routine. Learning new languages is both a fun and challenging way to give our brains the workout they crave. According to the infographic higher language skills are linked to growth in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex, where we process memory, thought and action. The increased size is associated with better memory and sharp thinking in old age. Apart from benefiting your brain, language also changes the way you think. For example, there are more terms for light blue and dark blue in Japanese than in English. This means that Japanese speakers can distinguish between multiple shades of blue as compared to English speakers.

View also:

Via: blog.sunbeltstaffing.com

http://elearninginfographics.com/learning-languages-affects-brain-infographic/

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How Learning Languages Affects Our Brain - EPALE - European Commission

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Speaking a foreign language is always useful but learning a new language can be a difficult task. There are so many weird rules, unfamiliar words and pronunciation problems that most of the time you believe that you'll never learn anything. It is easy to feel discouraged and to give up.

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Mark pagel

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Mark Pagel: Mark Pagel: Comment le langage a transformé l'humanité

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Le biologiste Mark Pagel partage une théorie fascinante sur la raison pour laquelle les êtres humains ont développé un système de langage complexe. Il suggère que le langage est un élément de " technologie sociale " qui a permit aux premières tribus humaines d'avoir accès à un outil nouveau et puissant : la coopération.

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Lera Boroditsky

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Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? For example, how do we think about time? The word "time" is the most frequent noun in the English language. Time is ubiquitous yet ephemeral. It forms the very fabric of our experience, and yet it is unperceivable: we cannot see, touch, or smell time. How do our minds create this fundamental aspect of experience? Do patterns in language and culture influence how we think about time?

Do languages merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express? Can learning new ways to talk change how you think? Is there intrinsic value in human linguistic diversity? Join us as Stanford cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky re-invigorates this long standing debate with data from experiments done around the world, from China, to Indonesia, Israel, and Aboriginal Australia.

Languages are Parallel Universes

"To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. "Each language has its own cognitive toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.

Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, her research shows, make people think and act differently.

Take a sentence such as "Sarah Palin read Chomsky's latest book." In Russian, the verb would have to indicate whether the whole book was read or not. In Turkish the verb would signify whether the speaker saw the event personally, or it was reported, or it was inferred. Russians have two words for blue, and when those words are present in their mind, they can distinguish finer gradations of the color than English speakers can.

Gender runs deep in some languages, affecting nouns (including number words and days of the week), adjective endings, pronouns and possessives, and verb endings. And that affects how people think about every named thing. In German the Sun is female and the Moon male; it's the reverse in Spanish. In French, "liberty" and "justice" are each female, and thus the Statue of Liberty is a female, and so is the blindfolded lady of justice in American courtrooms.

"'Time' is the most common noun in the English language," said Boroditsky. (Followed by "person," "year," "way," and "day.") Time is often expressed as travel in space: "We're coming up on Christmas." But some languages put the future in front of us, and others put it behind us. For Aborigines that Boroditsky studied in north Australia, time and sequence gets blended into their profound orientation to the cardinal directions. They don't use relative terms like "left" and "right," but absolute compass terms ("There's an ant on your southwest leg"), and they have extraordinary orientation skills.

When Boroditsky asked these aborigines to place a sequence of photos (a progressively eaten apple) in sequential order, they did not do it like English speakers (left to right) or Hebrew and Arabic speakers (right to left), they did it by the compass: from east to west. "These are not differences of degree," said Boroditsky, "but a parallel universe."

Different languages assign blame (agency) differently. English is uncommonly agentive, and so Dick Cheney had difficulty distancing himself from the fact that he shot his friend in a hunting accident: "Ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the shot that hit Harry." In Spanish, accidents are expressed in terms such as "The vase broke" rather than "John broke the vase." Political distancing language such as "Mistakes were made" doesn't sound awkward in Spanish. Fate looms larger.

Thus, "learning new languages can change the way you think," said Boroditsky. Multilingual speakers have more mind.

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Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? For example, how do we think about time? The word "time" is the most frequent noun in the English language. Time is ubiquitous yet ephemeral. It forms the very fabric of our experience, and yet it is unperceivable: we cannot see, touch, or smell time.

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How does language shapes the way we think

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How does language shapes the way we think

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Lera Boroditsky

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Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity.

I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight; a few pick hearing. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Turkish you'd have to include in the verb how you acquired this information: if you had witnessed this unlikely event with your own two eyes, you'd use one verb form, but if you had simply read or heard about it, or inferred it from something Bush said, you'd use a different verb form.

Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages? For some scholars, the answer to these questions has been an obvious yes. Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly.

Scholars on the other side of the debate don't find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse, encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don't include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn't mean that English speakers aren't paying attention to the same things; all it means is that they're not talking about them. It's possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.

Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it's distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentiality in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary: it requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.

Such a priori arguments about whether or not language shapes thought have gone in circles for centuries, with some arguing that it's impossible for language to shape thought and others arguing that it's impossible for language not to shape thought. Recently my group and others have figured out ways to empirically test some of the key questions in this ancient debate, with fascinating results. So instead of arguing about what must be true or what can't be true, let's find out what is true.

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms - north, south, east, and west - to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them - in fact, forces them - to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. 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. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.

People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month"). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.4

Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., "That was a short talk," "The meeting didn't take long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long" Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration, English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)5

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?

One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. In our lab, we've taught English speakers different ways of talking about time. In one such study, English speakers were taught to use size metaphors (as in Greek) to describe duration (e.g., a movie is larger than a sneeze), or vertical metaphors (as in Mandarin) to describe event order. Once the English speakers had learned to talk about time in these new ways, their cognitive performance began to resemble that of Greek or Mandarin speakers. This suggests that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think.6 In practical terms, it means that when you're learning a new language, you're not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking. Beyond abstract or complex domains of thought like space and time, languages also meddle in basic aspects of visual perception - our ability to distinguish colors, for example. Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colors than others, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages.

To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.

For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time.

Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making color judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory). The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments - and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers.

When Russian speakers are blocked from their normal access to language by a verbal interference task, the differences between Russian and English speakers disappear.

Even what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders ("gender" in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, "women, fire, and dangerous things."

What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun's gender. For example, to say something like "my chair was old" in Russian (moy stul bil' stariy), you'd need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with "chair" (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you'd use the masculine form of "my," "was," and "old." These are the same forms you'd use in speaking of a biological male, as in "my grandfather was old." If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat'), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of "my," "was," and "old."

Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" - a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish - the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world.7

In fact, you don't even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art - the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.

The fact that even quirks of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound. Such quirks are pervasive in language; gender, for example, applies to all nouns, which means that it is affecting how people think about anything that can be designated by a noun. That's a lot of stuff!

I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses.8 Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

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1 S. C. Levinson and D. P. Wilkins, eds., Grammars of Space: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

2 Levinson, Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

3 B. Tversky et al., " Cross-Cultural and Developmental Trends in Graphic Productions," Cognitive Psychology 23(1991): 515-7; O. Fuhrman and L. Boroditsky, "Mental Time-Lines Follow Writing Direction: Comparing English and Hebrew Speakers." Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2007): 1007-10.

4 L. Boroditsky, "Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?" Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (2007): 34.

5 D. Casasanto et al., "How Deep Are Effects of Language on Thought? Time Estimation in Speakers of English, Indonesian Greek, and Spanish," Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2004): 575-80.

6 Ibid., "How Deep Are Effects of Language on Thought? Time Estimation in Speakers of English and Greek" (in review); L. Boroditsky, "Does Language Shape Thought? English and Mandarin Speakers' Conceptions of Time." Cognitive Psychology 43, no. 1(2001): 1-22.

7 L. Boroditsky et al. "Sex, Syntax, and Semantics," in D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow, eds., Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 61-79.

8 L. Boroditsky, "Linguistic Relativity," in L. Nadel ed., Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science (London: MacMillan, 2003), 917-21; B. W. Pelham et al., "Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 82, no. 4(2002): 469-86; A. Tversky & D. Kahneman, "The Framing of Decisions and the Psychology of Choice." Science 211(1981): 453-58; P. Pica et al., "Exact and Approximate Arithmetic in an Amazonian Indigene Group." Science 306(2004): 499-503; J. G. de Villiers and P. A. de Villiers, "Linguistic Determinism and False Belief," in P. Mitchell and K. Riggs, eds., Children's Reasoning and the Mind (Hove, UK: Psychology Press, in press); J. A. Lucy and S. Gaskins, "Interaction of Language Type and Referent Type in the Development of Nonverbal Classification Preferences," in Gentner and Goldin-Meadow, 465-92; L. F. Barrett et al., "Language as a Context for Emotion Perception," Trends in Cognitive Sciences 11(2007): 327-32.

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HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?

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Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages?

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La spatialité et le temps

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Chinois mandarin : grammaire | Langues et grammaires en (Ile-de-)France

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Le chinois est une langue de la famille sino-tibétaine, divisée en un grand nombre de langues ou dialectes. La langue officielle (mandarin ou langue commune) s'appuie sur la prononciation et la grammaire de différents dialectes du Nord, dont celui de Pékin.

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How language seems to shape ones views of the world

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How language seems to shape ones views of the world

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NRP

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Lera Boroditsky once did a simple experiment: She asked people to close their eyes and point southeast. A room of distinguished professors in the U.S. pointed in almost every possible direction, whereas 5-year-old Australian aboriginal girls always got it right.

She says the difference lies in language. Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, says the Australian aboriginal language doesn't use words like left or right. It uses compass points, so they say things like "that girl to the east of you is my sister."

If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice.

Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of applied linguistics at Temple University. She studies bilingualism and is the author of an upcoming book on this work.

If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko.

For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material.

Based on her research, she started teaching future language teachers how to help their English-speaking students group things in Russian. If English-speaking students of Russian had to sort cups and glasses into different piles, then re-sort into chashka and stakan, they should sort them differently. She says language teachers could do activities like this with their students instead of just memorizing words.

"They feel generally that this acknowledges something that they've long expected, long wanted to do but didn't know how," Pavlenko says. "They felt that it moved them forward, away from teaching pronunciation and doing the 'repeat after me' activities."

Pavlenko points to research showing that if you're hungry, you'll pay more attention to food-related stimuli, and she says speaking another language fluently works the same way.

One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. She says Nabokov wrote three memoirs: He published one in English, and when another publishing house asked for one in Russian, he accepted, thinking he would simply translate his first memoir.

"When Nabokov started translating it into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English, and so in essence it became a somewhat different book," Pavlenko says. "It came out in Russian and he felt that in order to represent his childhood properly to his American readership, he had to produce a new version. So the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English."

Boroditsky also studied the differences in what research subjects remembered when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in how people remember what they saw, potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says.

John McWhorter, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experiments "show that there are these tiny differentials that you can find that seem to correlate with what language you speak," McWhorter says. "Nothing has ever demonstrated that your language makes you process life in a different way. It just doesn't work."

He calls this "the language hoax," which happens to be the title of his upcoming book.

As an example, he refers to modern speakers of a Mayan language, who also use directions that roughly correspond to compass points, rather than left or right. Researchers asked people, most of whom only knew this language, to do tasks like memorizing how a ball moved through a maze, which would have been easier had they thought about it in terms of left and right, rather than compass points. The participants were just as good at these tasks and sometimes better, leading the experimenters to conclude they were not constrained by their language.

Boroditsky disagrees. She says the counterexamples simply prove language isn't the only factor affecting what we notice. Like studying to be a pilot or doctor, she says, learning to speak a different language fluently can also change us, and this means we can learn those changes, like learning any other skill.

"It's like a very extensive training program," Boroditsky says. "There's nothing exotic about the effects that language has on cognition. It's just the same that any learning has on cognition."

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How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Lera Boroditsky once did a simple experiment: She asked people to close their eyes and point southeast. A room of distinguished professors in the U.S. pointed in almost every possible direction, whereas 5-year-old Australian aboriginal girls always got it right. She says the difference lies in language.

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Aneta Pavlenko

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Thinking and Speaking in Two Languages (Bilingual Education & Bilingualism)

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Until recently, the history of debates about language and thought has been a history of thinking of language in the singular. The purpose of this volume is to reverse this trend and to begin unlocking the mysteries surrounding thinking and speaking in bi- and multilingual speakers. If languages i...

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The bilingual mind

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Bilingual mind and what it tells us about language and thought | Psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics

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1. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and the bilingual turn in the study of language and cognition 2. Material worlds: linguistic categorization of the 'kaleidoscopic flux of impressions' 3. Multidimensional worlds: number, time, and space as linguistic systems of symbolic relationships 4. Dynamic worlds: linguistic construal of motion events 5.

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Liste de publications

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Boroditsky, L. (2009). How does our language shape the way we think? In Brockman (Ed.) What's Next? Dispatches on the Future of Science. Vintage Press.

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How Our Language Determines Our Reality

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Last week I explained how we live in a dualistic universe in which for any "thing" or concept to exist, we must distinguish between it and a not-that-thing or concept. Our most important tool for making distinctions and creating our reality is language.

As Edward Sapir, a noted anthropologist, has said:

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of a particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. The fact of the matter is that their "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up in the language habits of the group. . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.

Language is far more than a tool for communication. The word "language" comes from logos, which means category or concept. With language we categorize, distinguish, and create the universe. Ultimately, we perceive the world according to our language. For example, when we think in English, we perceive a world made up primarily of objects: people, trees, and houses. These objects do things or have things done to them using verbs. We literally seeeverything in the world in this fashion. We don't perceive "things out there" because there really arethings out there. That just happens to be our worldview, because in our language there is a subject, which acts upon an object, which exists independently of the subject. In the English language, independent entities (subjects and objects) are primary, rather than processes or relationships. That's not true in every language.

As Ralph Strauch points out in his book The Reality Illusion:

Some languages are structured around quite different basic word- categories and relationships. They project very different pictures of the basic nature of reality as a result. The language of the Nootka Indians in the Pacific Northwest, for example, has only one principle word-category; it denotes happenings or events. A verbal form like "eventing" might better describe this word-category, except that such a form doesn't sound right in English, with its emphasis on noun forms. We might think of Nootka as composed entirely of verbs, except that they take no subjects or objects as English verbs do. The Nootka, then, perceive the world as a stream of transient events, rather than as the collection of more or less permanent objects which we see. Even something which we see clearly as a physical object, like a house, the Nootka perceive of as a long-lived temporal event. The literal English translation of the Nootka concept might be something like "housing occurs;" or "it houses.

In a discussion of this point, Nobel Prize winning physicist Werner Heisenberg said:

What we are observing is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning. And how do we question? All of our methods of interrogating nature depend on language-and it is the very nature of language to refer to things. We therefore think in terms of things. How can we possibly think of nonthings, nothings, nothing? In our very forms of thought we instinctively divide the world into subjects and objects, thinkers and things, mind and matter. This division seems so natural that it has been presumed a basic maxim of objective science.

A dramatic (and sobering!) example of how language determines the distinctions we make can be found in the specific technical language that is used to describe nuclear weapons and arms control. Carol Cohn, a senior research fellow at the Center for Psychological Studies in the Nuclear Age, Cambridge, Massachusetts, spent a year as a visiting scholar at a defense studies center. She published some of her experiences in the Summer 1987 issue of SIGNS: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society, ©1987 by The University of Chicago Press, in an article titled "Nuclear Language and How We Learned to Pat the Bomb." She wrote:

The better I became at this discourse [of arms control], the more difficult it became to express my own ideas and values. While the language included things I had never been able to speak about before, it radically excluded others. To pick a bald example, the word "peace" is not a part of this discourse. As close as one can come to it is "strategic stability' a term that refers to a balance of numbers and types of weapons systems-not the political, social, economic, and psychological conditions that "peace" implies.

If I was unable to speak my concerns in this language, more disturbing still was that I also began to find it harder to keep them in my own head. No matter how firm my own commitment to staying aware of the bloody reality behind the words, over and over I found that I could not keep human lives as my reference point....

I was so involved in the military justifications for not using nuclear weapons-as though the moral ones were not enough. What I was actually talking about-the mass incineration of a nuclear attack-was no longer in my head.

As I learned to speak [this new language], I no longer stood outside the impenetrable wall of technostrategic language, and once inside, I could no longer see it. I had not only learned to speak a language: I had started to think in it. Its questions became my questions, its concepts shaped my responses to new ideas.(Emphasis added).

To reduce all this to the simplest possible statement: For us, reality is the way we experience it, which is rarely how it actually is. And our experience of reality is largely a function of our beliefs about reality, how reality occurs for us, and the language we use to describe reality.

Do you have any comments on how our language determines how we perceive "reality"?

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How Our Language Determines Our Reality - The Lefkoe Institute

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download Last week I explained how we live in a dualistic universe in which for any "thing" or concept to exist, we must distinguish between it and a not-that-thing or concept. Our most important tool for making distinctions and creating our reality is language.

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Jason Silva, Shots of awe

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"Shakespeare can free us from ourselves. His lush, prismatic verse grants us 'a small but metaphysically glorious holiday'..." Join Jason Silva as he freestyles complex systems of society, technology and human existence and discusses the truth and beauty of science in a form of existential jazz. Subscribe now!

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Psychedelics & language

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The Institute for the Encouragement of Outrageous Ideas welcomes you to the Psychedelics & Language website. Created by Dr. Diana Slattery of the Department of Xenolinguistics, the website provides extensive information about the bizarre linguistic phenomena - alien scripts, morphing symbolic systems, glyphs of living language crawling on every surface of a multidimensional world - encountered in altered states of consciousness.

These new forms of language glimpsed in the psychedelic sphere point to the co-evolution of language and consciousness catalyzed by psychedelic medicines. These phenomena, and the equally novel ideas about language that accompany them, are the subject matter of this website and of the book, Xenolinguistics: Psychedelics, Language, and the Evolution of Consciousness, to be published January 6, 2015 by North Atlantic Books, Evolver Imprint.

The experiential work of the Guild of Xenolinguists is the heart of this exercise in applied psychonautics and gonzo scholarship.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Institute for the Encouragement of Outrageous Ideas welcomes you to the Psychedelics & Language website. Created by Dr. Diana Slattery of the Department of Xenolinguistics, the website provides extensive information about the bizarre linguistic phenomena - alien scripts, morphing symbolic systems, glyphs of living language crawling on every surface of a multidimensional world - encountered in altered states of consciousness.