Blue, green or 'nol'? New study reveals that even before infants can talk, language shapes ...

[Jim__]

... their cognition

From MedicalXpress:

[center][/center]

A new Northwestern University study shows that even in infants too young to speak, the object categories infants form and their predictions about objects' behavior, are sculpted by the names we use to describe them.

As English speakers, we might encounter a natural scene and describe the blue lake, green grass and light blue sky in front of us. But speakers of Berinmo, an indigenous language of Papua New Guinea, have a single term for the colors we describe as blues and greens. They would describe the lake, grass and sky all as "nol."

"This cross-linguistic difference reveals that the particular categories we impose on our experience of the world are shaped by the language we speak. And this has consequences for thinking and memory," said senior author Sandra Waxman, the Louis W. Menk Chair in Psychology in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern and faculty fellow in the University's Institute for Policy Research. "Berinmo speakers are less likely to remember distinctions among shades that English speakers describe as blue versus green."

This compelling cross-cultural evidence leaves little doubt that the categories we form bear the imprint of our language. But how early in life does naming shape the categories we perceive?

more ...

[Igel]

1. Grain of sand = beach.

This gets tedious, and is the latest in a line of failed experiments to show the same thing. That language shapes cognition.

Not predispose a loss of remembered distinctions, which is what this does.

Invariably somebody publishes That Which Many Want To Believe, and everybody says, "Aha! I was right!" Then a year later somebody finds that the experiment was flawed or the analysis was flawed or that it was that one 1 in 20 chance that they're looking at. (I will give them credit. This will be hard to replicate to check that last bit.) Nobody in the "I want to believe" camp sees or follows the explanation of the flaws or the failure to replicate.

Last one of these I found had similar results. Took a year or two to undermine it, but it dealt with Russian sinij vs goluboj. Sinij is "dark blue", goluboj is "light blue." There's no cover term.


Immediately when a grain of sand is found, it's viewed as sweeping justification for all sorts of things. That grammatical categories make it harder to come up with some distinctions has been known for a long time. That it shapes language is a different sort of thing.

A lot of research was done on the acquisition of TAM in some European languages, and it meshed well with creolization studies. Aspect is typically acquired first. Tense is later. Native speakers of languages with less salient aspectual systems have a devil of a time with languages like Russian.

Similarly with classifier systems, e.g., English versus Japanese. Doesn't mean we perceive the world as different or think of the world differently. We just pay attention to different things.

[xocet]

3. Do any languages work purely in terms of aspect or in terms of tense? n/t

[Jim__]

4. The article reads to me more like: experimental result = empirical evidence

The empirical evidence that is cited in the article:

"Infants who heard two different names discerned two categories and therefore were able to anticipate correctly the likely location to which the test objects would move," she said.

In sharp contrast, infants who heard one name formed a single overarching category and therefore searched for new test objects at both locations.

The authors of the paper formed hypotheses, designed and performed experiments, observed the results, documented the results, and submitted their paper to the peer review process. Which it passed. Of course their results and inferences remain open to challenge. That's the way science works. Legitimate challenges to their claims are specific and cite evidence to counter the claims.

[On the Road]

2. In Addition to Current Primitive Tribes,

there is a whole history to the development of words about color beginning with the ancients:

http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/hoffman_01_13/