How does thought influence language

In contrast, the English language has 11 color words. Researchers hypothesized that the number of color terms could limit the ways that the Dani people conceptualized color. A recent review of research aimed at determining how language might affect something like color perception suggests that language can influence perceptual phenomena, especially in the left hemisphere of the brain.

You may recall from earlier chapters that the left hemisphere is associated with language for most people. Learn more about language, language acquisition, and especially the connection between language and thought in the following CrashCourse video:. Improve this page Learn More. Skip to main content. Thinking and Intelligence. Search for:. Language and Thinking Learning Objectives Explain the relationship between language and thinking. What Do You Think? Try It. Glossary Sapir-Whorf hypothesis : the hypothesis that the language that people use determines their thoughts.

The patient may be unable to pronounce a given word, but may lie able to indicate the number of its syllables he may forget his vocabulary in a definite order, as when he loses first his memory for proper names, then for specific and concrete terms, next for common nouns, and, last of all, fur other parts of speech. Like statements seem to apply to languages supposed to be invented by children: in every case where accurate data arc available, they arc found to be more or less drastic deformations of the vernaculars spoken around them.

From the strictly linguistic point of view, far more study would seem to be desirable in the fields of aphasia, insane languages, and the languages of children. Here the psychologist and the alienist should work in close co-operation with the linguist; and wherever pathological conditions exit, accurate case-histories arc a prime requisite.

The results of such investigations would, in all probability, be of much value for a knowledge of the underlying principles of language.

It is not, however, on the pathological side alone that such research should be made, but on the normal side as well; and we shall scarcely go far wrong if we say that one of the most urgent needs of the science of language to-day is a thorough treatment of linguistic psychology. This is a task much easier to set than to perform, for it demands an equally intensive training in psychology and in linguistics, not merely in two or three important languages or in one or two of the great linguistic families, but in the entire realm of language.

Such a task probably transcends the powers of any one man, so that collaboration seems the only method possible. Many attempts have been made to write psychologies of language, but almost exclusively either by linguists inadequately trained in psychology or by psychologists with insufficient knowledge of linguistics, and only too often in both camps to refute or to defend some preconceived theory.

In considering the relation between language and thought, we may roughly define thought as a purposive mental adjustment of means to ends, and in all but the most rudimentary modes of thought we may restrict this adjustment to non-immediate ends. This seems to be the cardinal distinction between the thought of man anti of non-human living beings, although in certain cases, as in long migrations of birds over the same course during long series of years, the test of non-immediacy seems scarcely valid.

Here we come into contact with instinct, which we may perhaps define as elementary thought which, through constant repetition under given circumstances, has become subconscious and quasi automatic. This seems implied by the instinctive aspect of vocabulary as contrasted with its intellective aspect, sincc, under stress, certain types of aphasia can pronounce words which they arc ordinarily unable to utter; and since observation of aphasia in general shows that the higher and voluntary aspects of a function suffer more than those which are lower and automatic.

Whether thought precedes speech, or whether speech or the capacity of speech a prerequisite of thought, is still a moot problem; but the bulk of evidence seems to be in favour of the priority of thought. This appears to be borne out by observation of the process of learning to speak ft language. Language has thus passed, like thought itself, from immediate to non-immediate adaptation of means to ends; but the problem is gravely hampered in its initial stages by the difficulty, if not the impossibility, of entering, in any adequate measure, into the thought of the child, and by the facts that the adult has forgotten the mental development through which he has passed in infancy and childhood, and that the child, in learning to speak, is guided, checked, and stimulated by the adults around him.

For the most part, facility in learning cither a single language or several languages simultaneously is greatest in the formative stages of the individual, when a language extremely difficult for an adult to acquire is mastered without apparent effort by the child, who may also speak with ease a number of languages of wholly different structure and vocabulary if in contact with those to whom such languages are vernacular.

The process of acquisition of a new language by an individual who has readied maturer years is also instructive in this regard.

Exact, observation is complicated here by the fact that the individual in question has already been affected by learning one language, however little he may remember of the processes whereby he gained that knowledge.

Nevertheless, if one who has consciously and deliberately acquired a speaking command of at least one language in addition to his original speech carefully examines the stages through which lie has passed, he will normally find the process to have been somewhat as follows. Brown and Lenneberg compared English with Shone from Zimbabwe and Bassa from Liberia and found that colours which have no name in the language are more difficult to recognise than those which do have a name in the language.

However it has been concluded that: while language acts as a label to help us remember it may distort our recollection of things seen, or tend to make us think in a particular way, but it does not determine what we have seen. Berlin and Kay determined that there are eleven basic colour categories: black, white, red, green, yellow, bllue, brown, purple, pink, orange, grey.

Linguistic Research Studies. Language in use. Does thought depend on language? Does language determine thought?