One of the more intersting theories in cognitive psychology is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which states that the words of our language affect how we perceive the world, especially the language that we learn first. (Yeah - I know this is a gross oversimplification. Feel free to leave critical comments so that my knowledge becomes more refined).
A recently published study - Words help us see and talk - may offer some experimental validation of this hypothesis. Researchers from UC-Berkeley and the University of Chicago presented rings of coloured squares to participants who were either native speakers of English or Tarahumara (a language indigineous to Mexico). The coloured squares were either all the same shade of green or blue, except for one “odd man out” square which was either a different shade of the same colour, or a shade of the other colour. Green and blue were used because in Tarahumara there is only a single word used for both green and blue. The results are fascinating:
The researchers found that participants responded more quickly when the color of the odd-man-out had a different name than the color of the other squares — as if the linguistic difference had heightened the perceptual difference — but this only occurred if the odd-man-out was in the right half of the visual field, and not when it was in the left half.
Why is this significant? The language centers in our brains are located primarily in the left half of the brain, which is also the side of the brain that processes information from the right visual field. The results showed a noticeable difference between the speakers of English and Tarahumara reacting to a difference between blue and green, but only when the “odd man out” square was presented on the right side of the visual field.
The paper, unfortunately, requires a login to the PNAS website, so I can’t look at the original paper. I am curious, though, to see if the participants in both groups - native English and Tarahumara speakers - were of similar ethnic background since variations in colour perception could also be genetic in origin. I suppose we could say that this shows the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is right, but not left. ;^D
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February 4th, 2006 at 06:34
There’s actually been a ton of research on linguistic relativity in the last few years. If you’re interested, check out this book:
Language In Mind
It presents a lot of the current research in cognitive science on the relationship between language and thought.
Also, Debi Roberson has been doing research on the effects of color terms on color perception and categorization for a few years now, with some interesting results (results that provide support for a weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis).