How deep are effects of language on thought? Time estimation in speakers of English, Indonesian, Greek, and Spanish

How deep are effects of language on thought? Time estimation in speakers of English, Indonesian, Greek, and Spanish Daniel Casasanto † Lera Boroditsky Webb Phillips Jesse Greene Shima Goswami Simon Bocanegra-Thiel Ilia Santiago-Diaz MIT Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, 77 Massachusetts Avenue NE20-457 Cambridge, MA 02139 USA Olga Fotokopoulu Ria Pita Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece David Gil Max Planck Center for Evolutionary Anthropology Jakarta Field Station, Indonesia Abstract from many previous inquiries into relations between language and thought: objectively evaluable linguistic data, and language-independent psychological data. A notorious fallacy, attributable in part to Whorf, illustrates the need for methodological rigor. Whorf (1939) argued that Eskimos must conceive of snow differently than English speakers because the Eskimo lexicon contains multiple words that distinguish different types of snow, whereas English has only one word to describe all types. The exact number of snow words the Eskimos were purported to have is not clear. (This number has now been inflated by the popular press to as many as two-hundred.) According to a Western Greenlandic Eskimo dictionary published in Whorf’s time, however, Eskimos may have had as few as two distinct words for snow (Pullum, 1991). Setting aside Whorf’s imprecision and the media’s exaggeration, there remain two problems with Whorf’s argument, which are evident in much subsequent ‘Language and Thought’ research, as well. First, although Whorf asserted an objective difference between Eskimo and English snow vocabularies, his comparative linguistic data were subjective and unfalsifiable: it is a matter of opinion whether any cross-linguistic difference in the number of snow words existed. As Geoffrey Pullum (1991) points out, English could also be argued to have multiple terms for snow in its various manifestations: slush, sleet, powder, granular, blizzard, drift, etc. The problem of unfalsifiability would be addressed if cross-linguistic differences could be demonstrated empirically, and ideally, if the magnitude of the differences could be quantified. A second problem with Whorf’s argument (and others like it in the contemporary Cognitive Linguistics literature) is that it uses purely linguistic data to motivate inferences about non-linguistic thinking. Steven Pinker illustrates the resulting circularity of Whorf’s claim in this parody of his reasoning: “[Eskimos] speak differently so they must think differently. How do we know that they think differently? Just listen to the way they speak! ” (Pinker, 1994, pg. 61). This circularity would be escaped if non-linguistic evidence could be produced to show that two groups of speakers who talk differently also think differently in corresponding ways. Do the languages that we speak affect how we experience the world? This question was taken up in a linguistic survey and two non-linguistic psychophysical experiments conducted in native speakers of English, Indonesian, Greek, and Spanish. All four of these languages use spatial metaphors to talk about time, but the particular metaphoric mappings between time and space vary across languages. A linguistic corpus study revealed that English and Indonesian tend to map duration onto linear distance (e.g., a long time), whereas Greek and Spanish preferentially map duration onto quantity (e.g., much time). Two psychophysical time estimation experiments were conducted to determine whether this cross-linguistic difference has implications for speakers’ temporal thinking. Performance on the psychophysical tasks reflected the relative frequencies of the ‘time as distance’ and ‘time as quantity’ metaphors in English, Indonesian, Greek, and Spanish. This was true despite the fact that the tasks used entirely non- linguistic stimuli and responses. Results suggest that: (1.) The spatial metaphors in our native language may profoundly influence the way we mentally represent time. (2.) Language can shape even primitive, low-level mental processes such as estimating brief durations – an ability we share with babies and non-human animals. Introduction “Are our own concepts of ‘time,’ ‘space,’ and ‘matter’ given in substantially the same form by experience to all men, or are they in part conditioned by the structure of particular languages? ” (Whorf, 1939/2000, pg. 138.) This question, posed by Benjamin Whorf over half a century ago, is currently the subject of renewed interest and debate. Does language shape thought? The answer yes would call for a reexamination of some foundational theories that have guided Cognitive Science for decades, which assume both the universality and the primacy of non-linguistic concepts (Chomsky, 1975; Fodor, 1975). Yet despite unreserved belief among the general public that people who talk differently also think differently (ask anyone about the Eskimos’ words for snow), it has remained widely agreed among linguists and psychologists that they do not. Skepticism about some Whorfian claims has been well founded. Two crucial kinds of evidence have been missing Corresponding author: Daniel Casasanto (djc@mit.edu)