Discovering the Links between Language and Thought
In This Chapter
Exploring whether language affects thought
Asking whether thought can exist without language
Contrasting the two different views
Take a moment and think about your breakfast this morning (we hope you’ve eaten; otherwise, this introduction may give you the munchies). Although you probably conjure up some mental imagery when asked to think about a particular concept in this way – for example, melted butter running off a slice of toast and onto your clean jacket – predominately you employ words and language to articulate your thoughts.
Does this vital use of words mean that the entire thought processes of humans are based on language? If you think yes, that would mean that people who speak different languages think differently to each other and those without language can’t think (which seems highly unlikely).
The breakfast thought experiment hints at a long-lasting, fiercely contested debate in psychology: does language affect or indeed guide thought? Does thought direct language? Clearly the two aspects are related (and in this chapter we often describe language and thought together), but what’s the nature of this link?
Two rival schools of thought exist, as follows:
Realists: Believe that language and thought are unrelated.
Constructionists: Believe that language influences thought. Many traditional thinkers thought, seemingly logically, that thought comes before language, but this opinion has been challenged.
In this chapter, we discuss the links between language and thought, including the most famous theory in this field (the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis) and the extensive evidence that supports it. We also look at the equally extensive evidence contrary to this theory. Throughout, we try and form a coherent response to the question: does thought require language?
Investigating the Idea that You Need Language to Think
Much evidence suggests that language affects thinking in profound ways. In this section, we back up this assertion of an intimate and essential link between language and thought. We look at language differences, colour perception and how children think, among other aspects.
Connecting language to thought
Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky believed that language and thought are intertwined and that during childhood development this relationship changes. Early on, thought and language are unrelated, but as children get older, language and thought become loosely related, with a behaviour preceding a verbal description. Subsequently, speaking out becomes internal speech, which allows people to create complex thoughts.
The main proponent of the idea that people require language in order to think and that language dictates how they think was American linguist Benjamin Whorf (don’t confuse with Mr Worf, the Star Trek character!).
His hypothesis is usually known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (or linguistic relativity). The idea is that the structure of someone’s language dictates how that person sees the world – how he devises concepts and categories, and memorises and thinks about his surroundings.
Psychologists talk in terms of strong and weak views of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis:
Strong view: Language must affect thought in all cases. In fact, you can’t have any kind of thought without language. Certain concepts that are expressible in one language can never be described in another language and a large number of untranslatable sentences are bound to exist: presenting the issue of translatability. Little evidence has been produced for the strong view.
Weak view: Language influences thought. Plenty of evidence supports this form of linguistic relativity (that is, language causes differences in mental processes). The form of people’s language affects how they think (called linguistic determinism). This view is similar to Vygotsky’s perspective that some thought requires language.
Considering cross-cultural language differences
Here we present the evidence for the weak view of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, which we introduce in the preceding section. The first line of evidence is the difficulty of translating between languages. However, this aspect is hard to assess because literal translations don’t necessarily translate to conceptual translations. Thus, researchers have devised more precise studies.
Many of these studies involve how people describe colours in different languages and reveal that language affects perception and, by extrapolation, thought.
Colour-recognition experiments show that lacking the word for a particular colour causes difficulty for people trying to remember that colour. For example, members of a Native American tribe who use only one word to describe yellow and orange (luptsinna) made more errors when spotting yellows and oranges than English speakers. Similarly, a New Guinean tribe with only two colour words demonstrated a worse recognition memory for colours than that of English speakers. (You can read more on this research in the later section ‘Seeing the same: Universal perception’.)
In another experiment that tested English participants only, participants were asked to either give names to colour chips or not. Their memory was subsequently tested. Naming the colour chips caused them to be recognised less accurately than not naming them, again highlighting how language interferes with perception.
Telling this from that: Categorical perception
Categorical perception is where people find that discriminating between two similar stimuli is easier when they’re from different categories (between-category) than if they’re from the same category (within-category). This tendency is found in the perception of colour, phonemes (spoken sounds; see Chapter 13) and emotional expressions.
Categorical perception is a prime candidate for showing the effects of language affecting perception. One example is that in Japanese the sound ‘r’ and the sound ‘l’ aren’t distinguished (which in the past led to countless, deeply unfunny racist ‘jokes’ centred on mixing up ‘rice’ and ‘lice’). No categorical boundary exists between these two sounds, because the language doesn’t feature a difference.
Similar effects exist in the cross-cultural categorical perception of colour. Tarahumaran speakers don’t have different names for blue and green, whereas English does. English speakers show a categorical boundary between green and blue, whereas Tarahumaran speakers don’t.
Presenting the evidence from child development
Further evidence that language is necessary for perception comes from studies with children. For example, they seem to require the language skills to express differences between two related items in order to solve problems associated with such relationships (check out the nearby sidebar ‘Articulating relationships between things’ for more details).
One useful method for assessing how language affects thought is to test people who don’t have language. New-born infants haven’t developed language yet and so are ideal participants.
Research on children has tended to explore colour perception and categorical perception (refer to the two preceding sections). Many studies show that children find it harder to discriminate between colours for which they don’t have verbal labels. In addition, categorical perception boundaries aren’t so readily identifiable in children.
Although some developmental changes in the perception of colour may exist, the focal colours (the 11 basic colour terms of English, including red and blue; see Chapter 5) do appear to be learnt earlier without words.
Covering other cognitive abilities
Here we provide more evidence of how language affects thought.
The way people label objects affects the accuracy with which they’re recognised. In one experiment, participants were presented with a series of fairly ambiguous objects that had been labelled or not. Labelling aided memory for the ambiguous objects, suggesting that language helps memory.
When presented with a series of shapes to remember, if participants verbally label based on distinctive labels (for example, crescent), they’re more likely to remember them than if participants verbally label based on common shared labels (for example, square). This is consistent with the weak form of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, because the language used has affected memory (refer to the earlier section ‘Connecting language to thought’).
A similar example of how language affects memory is the verbal overshadowing effect. This is where using language to describe objects actually makes them harder to remember subsequently. It’s found quite consistently with faces: after seeing a face, participants in a study were asked to describe it. Subsequently they had to identify the face from a line-up. Participants were very inaccurate at this task – worse than if they hadn’t described the face. This result provides evidence that language can alter the way people remember faces, which is consistent with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Another similar example is that of some false memory research. Elizabeth Loftus, an American psychologist, found that memory for events can be substantially altered after people are presented with leading questions. The results suggest that language can affect people’s memories, and thus their thoughts.
Some psychologists indicate that functional fixedness (that is, being unable to disengage the proper use of a particular object to solve an insight problem; see Chapter 17) is a consequence of language. In other words, if people didn’t have words for the objects, they’d be able to use the objects for something else.
One method to show how language affects cognition is to explore cultural stereotypes in bilinguals. For example, English contains a stereotype of an artistic type (moody, bohemian and a bit weird). But this stereotype doesn’t exist in Chinese Mandarin speakers. When asked to provide free interpretations, people are able to provide more detail if they meet up with a stereotype used in the language in which the participant was speaking. That is, people draw inferences based on the language they’re speaking. When bilinguals speak in one language, they’re thinking in a different manner than when speaking in their other language.
Evidence suggests that performance in a spatial-reasoning task (such as map reading) is affected by the language of the speaker. Participants whose language employs a relative spatial coding (that is, an object is described as being next to or left of, and so on, of another object) perform in a completely different manner to those whose language employs an absolute spatial coding system (when an object is described according to absolute positions such as north and south). So think carefully next time you’re giving directions to someone, if you want to arrive on time!
Thinking without Language: Possible or not?
The thinkers we discuss in the earlier section ‘Connecting language to thought’ believe that cognition drives language development. But others think the opposite – that language and cognition are independent faculties.
In this section, we introduce the research that indicates that thinking without language is possible. We look at evidence from consciousness, universal perception, expertise and work on children.
Bringing consciousness into the debate
Cognitive psychologists study how different processes work in the brain to enable human behaviour (see Chapter 1). For example, when you produce a sentence, a complex chain of events needs to occur – involving many different brain areas and different stages of information retrieval, planning and complex motor control – before you can utter a word. Yet, you aren’t consciously aware of all these underlying processes.
Sometimes psychologists use the term zombie brain to distinguish these many separate processes from conscious thoughts.
The human conscious mind is like the swan floating elegantly on the surface of the water while underneath its legs paddle furiously to cause the movement. This situation raises the following question: if conscious thoughts are in language but language is the result of lots of processes occurring in areas of the brain of which humans aren’t conscious, are humans really coming up with these thoughts themselves – or is the zombie brain doing it and letting the conscious brain know the result?
We look at consciousness here to explore whether unconscious thought, which typically isn’t based on language, exists and what its nature may be.
How do you know you exist?
French philosopher René Descartes famously wrote ‘Cogito ergo sum’ (‘I think therefore I am’).
This was long before the concept of virtual reality or the kind of illusory experience portrayed in films such as The Matrix, but Descartes was pondering the question of what people can know is real. He imagined a situation in which people’s senses were being fooled by demons so that what seemed liked reality was in fact an illusion. He asked what they could be certain of in these circumstances and came to the conclusion that although all their senses could be fooled, the one thing that people could be sure was real is their own consciousness. Yes, even your own body may be an illusion – you may be a brain in a vat being fed illusory sensory information from a computer (or demon). (Ah, ‘illusory sensory information’, as Homer Simpson would say, drooling.)
People can be sure that the thoughts they’re thinking are real – that is who they are and, so, they think therefore they are. The flip side of this idea is that people can only ever know their own consciousness – they can never know whether someone else is conscious or whether that person’s experience is like theirs.
Halt! Who goes there? I or iPad?
In the 1950s, computing pioneer and wartime code-breaker Alan Turing posed a related question – how would people know whether a computer was intelligent? The problem is similar to knowing whether another person is conscious – you can never really know, and instead you have to infer what’s going on inside based on their external behaviour. So Turing proposed a behavioural measure of intelligence, which is now known as the Turing test in his honour.
In the Turing test, a human judge communicates with two or more entities, which may be real people or computers pretending to be people, via a text-only medium – nowadays, with mobile phone text messages or chat software. Then the person judges the entities on the basis of what they say and how they interact with him rather than on how they look or sound. The test involves having conversations with the entities about whatever subjects the judge chooses and, based on their interactions, he has to decide which is human and which is the computer.
An annual competition (the Loebner Prize) implements a restricted form of the Turing test – researchers enter programs known as chatbots that have to compete with humans to convince human judges that they’re people. Judges are only allowed to converse on very narrow topics but, despite this, no computer program has yet claimed the prize for being a sufficiently convincing human, indicating that thought can go beyond language.
Seeing the same: Universal perception
Earlier in this chapter, we describe how language affects the perception of colour (in the section ‘Considering cross-cultural language differences’). However, cross-cultural language differences in colour perception aren’t always found. Eleanor Rosch Heider believes in something called the universals of perception, which is where people perceive the same thing regardless of their language.
Rosch Heider tested colour perception of a stone-age tribe from the rainforests of New Guinea called the Dani. The Dani had vastly different words for colours to English speakers. In fact, they had only two (mola for bright, warm hues and mili for dark, cold hues). But they were able to discriminate between two colours presented to them as accurately as English speakers. Given the existence of memory differences for colour stimuli between the Dani and English speakers, this suggests that language may affect memory but not perception.
The studies also found that the recognition memory for colour words was better for focal colours (the 11 basic colour terms used in English) compared with non-focal colours in English and Dani speakers. Thus, Dani speakers were better at remembering particular colours over other colours even though they don’t have the words to do so, but they weren’t as good as the English speakers.
Similar results have been obtained with memory for focal shapes. Dani speakers don’t have the same words for basic shapes as English speakers, and yet they can still discriminate between them.
Brent Berlin and Paul Kay also believe in the universals of perception and suggest a hierarchy of colour terms (black and white at the top, red next, as shown in Table 16-1), with those higher up the hierarchy existing in all languages and those lower down becoming less and less focal. Nevertheless, all peoples can discriminate the 11 focal colours. (Check out the later section ‘Comparing the Opposing Arguments’ to discover some compromises involved in this research.)
Based on the results of Rosch Heider and Berlin and Kay indicating that every human perceives the same colours (except those who are colour-deficient, obviously!), researchers concluded that perception is biologically derived; because people have a particular physiology (they have only three colour receptors; see Chapter 5), they perceive in a particular way. For example, you can distinguish the shade of a green basil leaf from a green spinach leaf (we’ve been gardening today, as you may be able to tell!), because the receptors in your eyes allow you to detect this difference. People whose language doesn’t have the word ‘green’ can still tell them apart, because the biology of their visual system allows them to see green.
Thus, perception is biologically determined rather than language determined. By extrapolation, other mental processes, including thought, aren’t language determined.
‘Well, I just dunnit really’: Expertise
If you ask expert footballers to describe the steps behind how they play, they often have difficulty. Being an expert at something often changes the mental processes involved so that describing how you do that activity is very difficult.
The fact that experts find it hard to verbalise their activity is evidence for thought processes that exist beyond language. However, this can be extended further: when expert sports people have to describe how they play their sport, they often become worse at it. This difficulty arises because they have to use language to describe an activity that they think about without language. In other words, behaviour can exist without language.
Automaticity is another form of thought without language. Tasks that people perform automatically are done without the need for language and thus highlight how language isn’t a requirement for thought.
Similarly, people may very easily describe a face, but research shows that their descriptions of faces don’t always match up to how they remember them; that is, people can’t actually describe the mental processes involved in recognising faces. The right words aren’t always available to represent the thought process accurately.
It started with a thought: Mentalese
The term mentalese refers to a special language of the brain. The idea is that when people produce a thought it starts out in some language of the brain, which is then converted into spoken language to enable them to communicate the thought to others. Similarly, when people speak to you, their language is converted into mentalese before you understand it.
Here are several of the arguments in favour of the theory that people think in mentalese rather than their normal spoken language:
People often have trouble putting ideas into words – if ideas already were in words, this wouldn’t be an issue.
People can coin new words or phrases for novel concepts, suggesting that ideas can precede the language needed to express them.
Pre-linguistic children and animals seem to be capable of some degree of thought prior to language. Helen Keller, who was blind and deaf from an early age, describes having thoughts without language.
The meaning of a sentence can be ambiguous when the intended meaning isn’t, which suggests that thoughts are less prone to ambiguity than the language used to express them. For example, the newspaper headline ‘Prostitutes Appeal to Pope’ is intended to mean one thing, but you could easily (and embarrassingly) interpret it in a very different way.
‘I don’t remember doing that – honestly!’
If people need language to think, a natural conclusion is that before they have language, they can’t think. But children have cognition and thoughts, and their language develops out of that, which is consistent with the view that cognition precedes language development.
The evidence comes from studies on cognitive abilities in children. As soon as children develop the concept of object permanence (that is, when an object is obscured by something, it still exists), they’re then able to use language to describe the object.
Thinking back to when you were a young child, before being able to talk, I’m sure that you believed you could think. The concept that you didn’t think at some point in your life is difficult to grasp. However, people don’t seem to have any memory before they develop language (called infantile amnesia; see Chapter 10). Thus, perhaps humans need language to form memories.
Comparing the Opposing Arguments
The preceding sections discuss two rival views: that thought is dependent on language and that thought isn’t dependent on language.
If you’re looking for a definitive answer in the published scholarly scientific articles, you may be disappointed. Researchers are providing more and more evidence for language affecting thought and for the exact opposite. In fact, the debates can get quite heated, with researchers for one perspective often criticising the methods employed by the opposing researchers!
Here we compare the arguments in a balanced view (to be honest, we don’t have a strong opinion either way – though maybe by the end of this section we will!).
Two differences between the results concerning perception differences due to different language are worth noting:
Language does seem to affect recognition memory. But when two colours are presented simultaneously or close in time, discrimination of colours is unaffected by language. Thus, language may not affect perception because of the basic physiological system, but may affect memory because memory is based on culture and experience.
Another problem with research conducted in this field is the often-found lack of control in these studies. For example, some research into the universals of colour perception failed consistently to apply the criteria used to define a focal colour. Such problems suggest that the universals of perception findings (such as the ones we discuss in the earlier section ‘Seeing the same: Universal perception’) are likely to be the result of poor methods.
Environment influences the exposure to certain colours and physiology dictates what colours are likely to be best recognised. Related to this finding is that although a linguist may suggest that a language doesn’t have a word for a particular colour, often those who speak a particular language do have a word to describe such things. For example, speakers of languages that use the same word for blue and green (linguists have said this about Welsh, but Welsh speakers say that they do have a word for green) may use another word to discriminate (for example, attaching the word ‘sky’ or ‘grass’ to differentiate the two colours). Check out the nearby sidebar ‘More than just Uncle Ben’s!’ for another example.
The environment may cause people to devise different words: that is, language and thought may be partially environmentally determined. Separating out the effects of the environment and culture from language is virtually impossible.
In part to resolve this debate, researchers have put forward a cognitive computational approach, which highlights that different languages can be used to transmit different information more easily than others. The idea is that when flexibility is involved in a particular task, language is likely to affect performance, but with no flexibility, physiology, biology and environment takeover. When people have one word to represent a particular concept, no load is placed upon their cognitive resources. But if they require more words to represent the same concept (because their language doesn’t have that word), a greater load is placed upon working memory.
This load can have knock-on effects on thought processes. For example, Chinese Mandarin has single words for the numbers 0–10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 but, unlike English, not for 11, 12 or the teens. So when an English person says 11, a Mandarin speaker requires two words, 10 and 1 combined, which involves more cognitive effort (though only slightly!).
So, sometimes thought is dependent on language and sometimes it’s not (isn’t that always the case in psychology!). This is pretty much what Lev Vygotsky said in the 1930s (that some thoughts don’t require language because they’re biologically predetermined, but more complex thoughts do require language): check out the earlier section ‘Connecting language to thought’ to find out more.
Whatever the truth, the relationship between language and thought is a complex one.
Exploring whether language affects thought
His hypothesis is usually known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (or linguistic relativity). The idea is that the structure of someone’s language dictates how that person sees the world – how he devises concepts and categories, and memorises and thinks about his surroundings.
Psychologists talk in terms of strong and weak views of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis:
The way people label objects affects the accuracy with which they’re recognised. In one experiment, participants were presented with a series of fairly ambiguous objects that had been labelled or not. Labelling aided memory for the ambiguous objects, suggesting that language helps memory.
This load can have knock-on effects on thought processes. For example, Chinese Mandarin has single words for the numbers 0–10, 100, 1,000 and 10,000 but, unlike English, not for 11, 12 or the teens. So when an English person says 11, a Mandarin speaker requires two words, 10 and 1 combined, which involves more cognitive effort (though only slightly!).