Dissociating language
and circumstance:
Eskimos to Bermuda.
Move Americans to Vail or Aspen
‘sugar’
‘granule’
OR……
‘powder’
FALC0NRY
THOUGH THAT HER JESSES
WERE MY DEAR HEARTSTRINGS,
I’D WHISTLE HER OFF AND
LET HER DOWN THE WIND,
TO PREY AT FORTUNE.
OTHELLO, III, I, 260-263
Correlations of language and thought
…In short, pace Li and Gleitman, the
evidence remains that the frames of reference
used in people’s language match those used in
their nonlinguistic cognition. (Levinson, 2003).
…Remember those Eskimos and their
snow words.
N
nd
42
10th
S
N
nd
42
10th
S
N
nd
42
th
10
S
N
42nd
th
10
S
W
E
42nd
10th
Two sane manipulations
Two languages vary in their labeling practices.
Does the labeling predict sorting or memory?
(as in e.g., Papafragou, Massey and Gleitman’s st
Study of path/manner, or Li and Gleitman on tight
fit/ loose fit).
Names for artifacts (Malt, Sloman, Gennari, 2003)
In English, a plastic container for holding drinks,
having a straw and the shape of Mickey Mouse, is
called a water bottle, but a plastic container for
holding drinks, having a straw and in the shape of a
bear, is called a juice box.
60 photos of containers found in homes, grocery, and
drug stores in China, Argentina, USA, e.g., asperin
bottle, baby bottle, peanut butter jar, mustard jar, milk
jug, margerine tub, juice box.
A. Sorts: overall similarity, similarity of physical
features, similarity of functional features.
B. Names.
The various sorts intercorrelated approx .94.
The names intercorrelated approx .33.
The categories of one language were not neat
subsets or supersets of each other.
A model of factors entering into linguistic
categorization showed that different factors
counted in different languages; but these
were not the factors that entered into sorting.
Fundamental spatial concepts
ON
Munnich & Landau, 2001
ABOVE
Memory for displacements…
Crossed by contact
When language effects are
achieved: I. Boundary effects
1. The stimulus is highly ambiguous with regard to
the factors varied . (For clear cases, no effect).
2. Language is explicit in the situation “This is my
blicket.” “See that blicket?” (For clear cases, no
effect).
An internal dialogue: This guy is speaking English. He
introduces a new expression. What proportion of N’s in
English are count? What proportion of NP’s in English
have count-nouns as their heads? Blicket is “probably” a
count noun. And hence “probably” encodes an object
rathre than a mass. And thus “probably” will label a rigid
shape.
See that blicket? Find some
more.(((Imai and Gentner)
A regular T-like shape. Of some new material.
A puddle-like shape. Of some new material.
English: “Water” versus
“A cube”
Japanese: No count/mass morphology.
When language effects are
achieved: II. The belief that
syntax to semantics mappings are
arbitrary and variable.
…
He’s sebbing
Using Linguistic
Context
R. Brown, 1957
Look, a seb!
Using Linguistic
Context
Some seb
Using Linguistic
Context
Brown,
1957
When language effects are
achieved: III. When correlations
seem like causal relations
…
Caiuses, effects, confusions
Is deduction from structure
“Whorfian”?
It was shown experimentally that young Englishspeaking children take the part-of-spech membership
of a new word as a clue to [its] meaning. In this way
they make use of the semantic distinctiveness of the
parts of speech. It seems quite probable that speakers
of other languages will also know about the semantics
of their grammatical categories. Since these are
strikingly different in unrelated languages, the
speakers in question may have quite different
cognitive categories. It remains to be determined
how seriously and how generally thought is affected
by these semantic distinctions.
At the Northeast
Corner
At the circle
Northeast of the
circle.
X
X
X
Cheng, 1986; Gallistel,
1990;
Hermer & Spelke, 1994
The language format supports
new thought (Spelke, 2003)
[given the geometric module]…a rat or child who has seen an object
hidden to the left of a long wall searches reliably to the left of that
wall…Children therefore may learn the meaning of the term left by
relating expresions involving that term to purely geometric
representations….Children also have relatively modular systems for
learning about color and other properties of objects, permitting [learning
of wall and blue]. The combinatorial machinery of language allows
children to formulate and understand expressions such as left of the blue
wall with no further learning. This expression cannot be formulated
readily outside of language, because it crosscuts the child’s encapsulated
core domains. Thanks to the language faculty, however, this expression
serves to represent the conjunction of information quickly and flexibly.
Such use may underly adults’ flexible spatial performance.
My response to [Fodor’s] argument is to grant it. Children
learn many of the words of their language by relating those
words to preexisting concepts. Moreover, children cannot
learn, through language or any other means, any concepts
that they cannot already represent. If children cannot
represent the concept “left of the bllue thing,” then they
cannot learn to represent it. Natural languages, however,
have a magical property. Once the speaker has learned the
terms of a language and the rules by which these terms
combine, she can represent the meanings of all grammatical
combinations of those terms without further learning. The
compositinal semantics of natural languages allows children
to know the meanings of new wholes from the meanings of
their parts….Thanks to their cmpositional semantics, natural
languages can expand the child’s conceptual repertoire to
include not just the preexisting core knowledge concepts but
also any new well-formed combination of those concepts.
Secure the building!
…Lucas (5 years) told me about a new exercise they have in his
school…He said that in addition to fire drills they now have Secure
the Building. He explained that when there is a Secure the Building
the children go into the coatroom (which is good, he said, because
you can have a snack there or read a book). Or if there is a Secure
the Building during music class, the children sit behind or next to the
piano. I asked him why there are Secure the Buildings and he said
in case something mean is in the school. Like what? I asked. He
said perhaps a cheetah or a porcupine. I was especially struck by
his uncertainty about what Secure the Building means: It might as
well be Securethebuilding or Ingbuildsecurethe. The main thing is
that it’s terribly exciting and sometimes you can have a snack.
The
meaning
of
look
_____________________________
“Look up!”
Blind understanding of color
(Landau and Gleitman 1985)
1. Red is a color word; dirty is not.
2. Color is the supernym for color words.
3. “Can a cow be red?”
“I think they’re white or brown.”
“Can an idea be green?”
“That’s silly. Ideas are only in your head, you
think about them.”
4. Mapping onto the hues of things in the world.
Blind deficit (Landau and Gleitman 1985)
1. Color is the supernym for color words.
2. “Can a cow be red?”
“I think they’re white or brown.”
1. Red is a color word; dirty is not.
“Can an idea be green?”
“That’s silly. Ideas are only in your head, you
think about them.”
4.
Mapping onto the hues of things in the world.
Brown + cow = brown cow.
(and for a large proportion of A, AN is their
intersection.)
All past uses of “green” modified concrete objects.
A variety of modifiers are restricted for use with
concrete objects, e.g., tall, furry, sweet.
In fact the range of use for “green” with this child
seems to have been restricted to:
- brail-coded crayons (ha ha)
- stacking rings of different sizes
When language effects are
achieved: IV. When they are
momentary.
…
Mandarin and English speakers’
conceptions of time.
Lera Boroditsky (2001)
Cognitive Psychology
Dread events lie ahead.
Now they are behind us.
This was true up to our own time.
That was true of all governments
down to 1863.
Easter is coming up.
The
circle
will win.
The
circle
will
win.
Easter precedes
Christmas.
Labor Day comes
after Memorial Day
.
Fodor is a Whorfian
1. Languages have different lexical items
(words).
2. Words are nondecomposable monads.
3. Semantic representations (SR) and conceptual
representations (CR) are coextensive.
4. Then, since we think in CRs, users of diffeent
languages think differently.
5. So it follows that “nondompositionalists” are
implicit Whorfians – a fact that they do not
seem to have appreciated.
(Levinson, 2003).