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Two relativity hypotheses

A Reboul, ILCAA, TUFS, TokyoIn 2005, Dan Everett
published a paper,“Cultural constraints
on grammar andcognition in Pirahã”,
in the journal Current
Anthropology. This
paper made him famous
overnight, not only inthe linguistic
community, but in thegeneral public, making
it into the headlinesof daily newspapers.

 Thus Everett was sent to live with
the Pirahã, a tribe ofAmerindians, living in the
Amazonia by the Maici river. The
Pirahã tribe counts around 450
individuals, scattered in small
villages along the Maici (spreadon the 200 miles stretch of theriver). There was no reliablegrammar or dictionary for the
Pirahã language and Pirahã aremonolingual (their Portuguese isextremely limited). In otherwords, there was no interpreter,when Everett went to live withthem in 1977.

Everett began his scientific life as an
employee of the SIL (Summer Institute of
Linguistics). The SIL is a missionary
agency, founded by evangelic churches
around the world, which sends people
trained in field linguistics topopulations whose language has not been
completely or not at all described.
These linguists have a double mission:
 Writing a complete description of thelanguage (grammar and dictionary); Translating the bible into the language.

In the paper that made him (in)famous,
Everett claimed that there were several
striking “gaps” in Pirahã culture andlanguage: Culture: Limited technology (bows and arrows), no
creation myths, no rituals.

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Syntax:
 No movement (no passive), no recursion(no relatives, embedded genitives…), no
grammatical number (plural/singular);Semantics:
 No quantifiers (some, all), no cardinals(one, two, many), no color terms.

In addition, Everett claimed that allthese specificities of Pirahã culture
and language are not coincidental, but
are rather a coherent set which can be
deduced from or explained by a single
overarching principle: Immediacy of Experience Principle:
 “This principle states that formulaic
language and action (rituals) that involvereference to nonwitnessed events are
avoided” (E., 2008)
 More generally, it enjoins “ the restrictionof communication to the immediate experienceof the interlocutors” (E., 2005).

Everett’s paper was heavily criticized
and all of his claims have been called
into doubts, excluding the claim
regarding technological culture.
Alternatively, some critics noted thatthese “gaps”, taken individually, arenot specific to the Pirahã culture or
language.
Further criticism has been leveledagainst the IEP itself, to the effectthat it does not predict the gaps
described by Everett.

 Biopaiai (black extended)First collected by Sheldon for WCS

Bii
-opai
Blood dirty/opaque
Blood is dirty

ai
be/do

 Kobiai (white extended)
K
ObjectIt sees

-obi
-see

ai
be/do

 Biisai (red/yellow)
Bii
Blood
Bloodlike-sainominalizer

 Aboasaaga (green/blue, green focused)

Aboas
Immature
Temporarily immature

aaga
be:temporary2

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Regarding the existence of color terms
in Pirahã, there are two issues:
 Are the color meanings consensual andapplicable to unfamiliar objects (as well
as familiar objects)?
 Are the color meanings not predictablefrom the meanings of words that make up
the color expressions?

Kay notes that, given Sheldon’s data,
the answer to the first question isclearly positive, though the answer tothe second question is less clear.

Kay notes that there are plenty oflanguages in which the terms for red andgreen are related respectively to the terms
for blood and immaturity.
More generally, Wierzbicka notes that
Everett’s gloses are debatable:
 For instance, though etymologically the
English verb understand is derived from the
preposition under and the verb stand, itwould not make sense to glose “Peter
understands Japanese” as “Peter stands
under Japanese”…
 And this seems to be just what Everett was
doing!

It is indeed hard to see why the IEP
should predict (or explain) the lack ofquantifier terms, cardinals or color
terms:

Everett’s conviction regarding the IEP
is that it merely mirrors a more general(and deep) influence of culture on
language (including grammar): All of these seem directly applicable toimmediately experientiable states ofaffairs:
 For instance, all or some are applicable toperceptible situations (e.g. Xahoábisi ate
all the fish).
 Some cardinals (one, two, many) are also

 “Specific values (…), along with thedirectly biological values (like shelter,
clothing, food, and health) act together
to produce an integral whole of language
and culture, by means of which weinterpret and talk about the world”.
Everett, 2008.

directly perceptible due to subitization(the widespread ability to perceptually
evaluate small quantities).

The alternative hypothesis goes in the
opposite direction:
 It claims that language deeply influences
our view of the world (our culture) andeven our very perception of it.

I will call it the Relativity of Culture
to Language (RCTL) hypothesis.

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E. Sapir (18841939)

B. Whorf (1897-1941)

Sapir and Whorf (who was Sapir’s
student and disciple) were specializedin Amerindian languages of North
America: Such languages do not have tenses;
 This led Sapir and Whorf to the strong
claim that Amerindians speaking thoselanguages had no concept of time.
 More generally…

Human beings do not live in theobjective world alone, nor alone in theworld of social activity as ordinarily
understood, but are very much at themercy of the particular language which
has become the medium of expression for
their society… The worlds in which
different societies live are distinct
worlds, not merely the same worlds withdifferent labels attached.
Sapir 1929.

We dissect nature along the lines laid
down by our native languages. The
categories and types that we isolate
from the world of phenomena we do notfind there because they stare every
observer in the face; on the contrary,
the world is presented in a
kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which
has to be organized by our minds — andthis means largely by the linguistic
systems in our minds.
Whorf 1956.

These two relativity principles seem go in
opposite causal directions: RLTC: Culture Language; RCTL: Language  Culture.

However, the fact that they are opposite incausal direction does not mean that they
are incompatible: They could simply apply to different parts oflanguage or cognition at different times.

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The problem with general principles isthat they can be too easily satisfied to
be interesting, i.e. they can betrivial.
Both RLTC and RCTL are generalprinciples and, on that count,susceptible of the triviality charge:
 RLTC is too easily verified; RCTL can be weakly verified, in whichcase, again, it is too easily satisfied.

Given the lack of definition of the term
culture in Everett’s claim, it is easy toshow that the hypothesis is trivially true: Even eschewing technological innovation,
words enter languages when new objects are
introduced:
 For instance, European languages had no words
for turkeys, potatoes, tomatoes and maize
before the discovery of America in 1495.

Clearly this is not what Everett had inmind: Rather, he thought more of something on thelines of cultural values (as shown by the
IEP).

Linguistic variation is rather more
limited than Sapir and Whorf thought.
Three main domains of variation havebeen identified: Space: Languages vary relatively to the reference
frames (egocentric, intrinsic or absolute)
they use; Time: Languages vary relative to the tenses they
include; Color terms:
 Languages vary relative to the color terms
in their lexicon.

RCTL can be read in two ways:
 Weak reading: Having a word for something will enhanceyour attention to it and will make you
better at discriminating it; Strong reading: It is only if you have a word (or someother linguistic construction) for a thingthat you can perceive it.

Clearly both Sapir and Whorf intended
the strong interpretation (and indeed
the weak interpretation is both trivial
and not specific to language).

Space is the wrong choice because, as
shown by experimental studies, it leads
to the trivialization of both the RLTC
and the RCTL hypotheses:
 Some languages exclusively use theabsolute frame of reference (using the
cardinal points):
 That choice seems to occur only inpopulations living in areas where thegeography gives strong clues to thecardinal points:
 Triviality of RLTC; Experimental studies indicate that such
populations have a preference for the useof the absolute frame in non-linguistic
tasks, but not that they cannot use otherframes:5

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A main problem with the perception oftime is that it is difficult to isolate
precisely the effects of language fromother possible effects linked, forinstance, to technological instruments
for the measure of time.
A second important problem is that it is
not clear what exactly would be meant by
a claim such as “Population x does nothave the same concept of time as
population y”.
 This has to do with the fact that theconcept of time is anything but clear, as
was noted by Augustine of Hippo, in his

For what is time? Who can consider
and briefly explain it? Who even inthought can comprehend it, even to
the pronouncing of a word concerning
it? But what in speaking do we refer
to more familiarly and knowingly thantime? And certainly we understandwhen we speak of it: we understandalso when we hear it spoken of byanother. What, then, is time? If noone asks of me, I know; if I wish to
explain it to him who asks, I know
not…
Augustine of Hippo, circa 450.

The field of color has three advantages:
 Its perception seems to be biologically
based;
 Colors are immediately perceptible; It is susceptible of categoricalperception.

The color vision ofmost mammals isbichromatic (blue —yellow).
The color vision ofmost primates istrichromatic (blue —yellow — red).

Additionally, Colors have been widely studied in thepast fifty years and it is thus time toreview the evidence and assess whether it
supports either the RCTL or the RLTC
hypothesis, none of them or both.

We, primates…

…and the othermammals!

Confronted by discrete
stimuli, you can ask
whether they belong inthe same category, but
you don’t have to worry
about how to distinguishthe individuals.

Confronted with acontinuum, you cannot
identify individuals apriori. The answer tothat difficulty goes
through categoricalperception.

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 Categorical perception isdefined as what happens “whenstimuli that straddle a categoryboundary are perceived as more
distinct than equivalently
spaced stimuli within acategory”
Kay & Regier, 2006.

Differences in color terms between
languages can be of two sorts:
 Not the same inventory of color terms(but common boundaries); Not the same boundaries between color
terms.

Categorical perception “warps” colored space by
exaggerating the distance between swatches B and C and by
reducing the distance between A and B, on the one hand, as
well as that between C and D, on the other.

Is the partition of the colored spectrum
universal (identical through languages andcultures)?
 From the partition in different languages.

Does categorical perception of colors
depend on language?
 From prelinguistic infants;
 From cerebral lateralization of categoricalperception.

Is categorical perception arbitrary?

The vertical axis represents the value (light —dark).
The horizontal axis represents chromatic
saturation.

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Subjects are asked to perform twocomplementary tasks:
 Name the color when presented with aswatch (for all the 330 swatches in thescale):
 This makes it possible to identify thecolor boundaries for the language;

 Show the best exemplar for a given color
on the Munsell scale: This makes it possible to identify the“centroid” (or prototype) for the color.

In the 60s, Brent Berlin, ananthropologist, and Paul Kay, alinguist, collaborated on a study ofcolor terms in different languages.
They reached the conclusion that color
perception was universal:
 Everyone cuts up the color spectrum inthe same way;
 However, languages don’t have the same
set of color terms:
 Nevertheless, they all follow the same
pattern.

Bornstein et al. (1976) have tested CP in
4-month-old infants on the four primarychromatic colors of Berlin & Kay (blue,
green, yellow, red).
They used an habituation/dishabituation
paradigm.
“The hierarchy constrains basic colour term inventories in thefollowing ways: first, all languages have between two and 11
basic terms; second, if a language has one of the possible terms,
then it should have all the terms to the left of it in thehierarchy. (…) The most crucial development is the distinction
between ‘primary’ categories (the first six terms on thehierarchy) and ‘derived’ colour categories (the last fiveterms)”
Davies et al. 1998.

Infants gaze longer at a new color which
belongs to a different adult category
than at a new color which belongs to thesame adult category at a constantperceptual distance.

 The number of categories (all are notnecessarily realized in a language), andwhen they are not all expressed, two or
more different categories are grouped
together in a single category(blue/green — grue).
A category is subdivided (in violationof the hierarchy).

siniy

goluboy

The boundaries between color terms varyfrom one language to the next.
Winawer et al. 20078

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Berinmo: Papua New Guinea

yeonduchorokRoberson et al. 2008

Davidoff el al. 1999

The WCS has collected data on color
terms in 110 languages spoken by non
industrial populations from 2616
informers most of them monolinguals,
using the Munsell scale.
 Each informer named each of the 330
swatches (presented individually in aquasi-random order): This data was used to establish theboundaries between colors for a given
language; Each informer had to indicate, for eachcolor term in his language, the best
exemplar of this color:912/01/2011

WAP

WOR
NOL

The distribution of colors on the Munsell scale seenfrom above: “The outermost contour represents a heightof 100 centroids, and each subsequent contour
represents an increment in height of 100 centroids.
English color terms fall near the peaks of the WCS
distribution” (Kay & Regier 2003).

Additionally, despite the relative
specificity of the color lexicon (3chromatic terms) of Berinmo, the effects
seem limited: In no cases is color perception affected.

MEHI

MEHI

KUL

The results of the WCS go into different
directions: Color boundaries may differ importantly(as shown by the Berinmo example); What is affected, however, are:
 Memory; Categorical perception (quickness of
discrimination).

 Color centroids, on the other hand, tend
to gather together (even Berinmo
centroids).

Left visual field(LVF)

Right visual field
(RVF)

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Gilbert et al. 2006

A. Lateral view.
B. Areas of the brain showing
a stronger activation in
the different-category
condition than in theidentical-category
condition.
C. Areas of the brain showing
a significantly slower
activation in theidentical-category
condition than in the
different-category

Roberson et al. 2008

Siok, Kay et al. 2009

Koreans are quicker to
identify an intruder
from a different
category than from thesame category.
However, there seems to
be no difference
between the LVF and the
RVF.
Among Koreans, there wasa slow and a quick group.
In the slow group, there
is no difference between
the LVF and the RVF. In
the quick group, there isan effect of RVF.
This difference may comefrom the fact that the
information has time totransit from the right tothe left hemisphere in
the slow group.

Background green

Different
positionsof thetargetDifferent
color target,
eitheridenticalcategory(green), or
differentcategory(blue)

Franklin et al. 200811

12/01/2011Same paradigm.
Subjects (2 to 5 year-olds) divided in
two groups:
18 adults: 11 women, 7 men; mean age: 21,8 years;
native language: English.
13 children: 5 girls, 8 boys; mean age: 20,61 weeks.
Procedure: eye movement towards the target.

 “learners” (mean age: 32 months);
 “namers” (mean age: 46 months);
 On the basis of linguistic tests:
 Naming the color of a swatch; Showing a swatch from a name.

Targets from different
categories are detected
more quickly than targets
from identical categories
when they are presented in
the LVF in learners andwhen they are presented in
the RVF in namers.

This effect is robust:
It is still extent when
statistical procedures
take age into account.

Is the partition of the colored spectrum
universal?
 From the WCS, there is limited variation.

Does CP for colors depend on language?
 From the evidence of Bornstein et al.,confirmed by Franklin et al.,prelinguistic infants manifest CP for
colors, though it is right-lateralized.
 Lateralization for color CP is leftlateralized after language acquisition.
 CP does not depend on language, but it
might be modified by language acquisition.

Is CP arbitrary?
 There, the answer should be clearly: NO!

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Do the effects indicated above verify
the RCTL predictions?
RCTL predictions: Strong: Subjects will only be able to perceive thecolors named in their native language.

 Weak: Subjects will be quicker to discriminate
colors named in their native language.

Clearly, the effects outlined above are
weak.

Gilbert et al. 2008

Reference task: indicating by pressing the space key
whether the stimulus (verbal or non-verbal) is the same as
the preceding one.
Detection task: press the right or left key depending on
which side of the display the target is presented.

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Given that there is no categoricalperception involved in categorizing catsand dogs (dogs and cats do not form acontinuum), it is doubtful that thelateralization data on colors is directly
related to categorical perception.
But if lateralization is independent of
categorical perception, and if it also
exists for categories which are clearly
universal, it does not in fact support the
RCTL hypothesis.
In fact, it merely supports the link
between (lexicalized) concepts andlanguage.
So the only remaining evidence favoring the
RCTL is the (limited) variability for color
terms in languages.

“The empirical literature suggests
that, on the one hand, there is a gooddeal of universality in color
categorization across cultures, whereas
on the other hand, a considerable amountof variation is also observed”
Komarova & Jameson 2008

Here we come back to the RLTC
(relativity of language to culture) andtwo sources for variability in color
lexicons come to mind:
 Observer heterogeneity: Differences in people’s abilities todiscriminate colors may lead to differencesin the color lexicon.

 Color space: Differences in the colors available in theenvironment make a difference for the color
lexicon: In fact, this was the rationale for the
WCS’s concentrating on languages from nonindustrial populations.

One of the more striking results of the
WCS is the variability between subjects
speaking the same language:
 In that case, the variability is not
linguistic (they speak the samelanguage), but perceptual: Not everybody perceives the same Munsell
swatch in the same way.

Incidentally, this goes rather against
the RCTL, but possibly in favor of the
RLTC.

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Colored perception is geneticallydetermined: There are sexual differences: Women are better discriminators of colors
than men.

In a small and isolated population(which is often the case of preindustrial populations), even recessive
genes can have an important effect.
Komarova et Jameson (2008) have shownthat even a small number of individuals
with atypical colored perception isenough to induce a variation in color
boundaries in a given language.

In preindustrial populations, there are
generally fewer artifacts than inindustrial populations.
Artifacts are an important source ofcolors.
In preindustrial populations, the colors
available in the environment (the color
space) are limited.
It is likely that it is precisely thesmall number of colors available in theenvironment, which produces the often
relatively poor repertory of colors inpreindustrial populations.

RLTC:
 “Specific values (…), along with thedirectly biological values (like shelter,
clothing, food, and health) act together
to produce an integral whole of language
and culture, by means of which weinterpret and talk about the world”.

RCTL:
 “The worlds in which different societies
live are distinct worlds, not merely thesame worlds with different labels
attached”.

RCTL: As we have seen before, the evidence atbest favors the weak reading of RCTL: Language makes it easier to discriminate
those categories that are expressed in thelanguage;

RLTC:
 Again, the evidence at best verifies thetrivial reading of RLTC:
 Environment and material culture influence
the existence of words for important
objects in the environment.

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It is always difficult to interpret
negative evidence, especially when it islimited.
The present data is limited to color.
The WCS is limited to 110 languages,
while there are 6912 known languages in
the world (Gordon 2005).
Some cases may turn out where either orboth of the RLTC and RCTL are verified
in their nontrivial forms.

Basically, both the RCTL and the RLTC in
their non-trivial forms assume that
there can be top-down influences from
culture on language and from language on
discrimination and perception.
So, a relevant question is: Is there any evidence of such top-down
influences on perception?

There is indeed a lot of evidence fromthe perception literature showing that
we don’t see things which are in fullview: Change blindness;
 Inattentional blindness;
 Contextual blindness.

Inattentional blindness occurs whenattention is focused on a perceptual
task and leads to ignoring what isirrelevant to the task:
 This was demonstrated spectacularly by
Simons & Chabris (1999) who presented
subjects with a video showing 6 students
in a hall, 3 dressed in white, 3 inblack, exchanging balls (each “team”
had one): They asked the subjects to count the numberof passes made by the players dressed inwhite:

50% of the subjects do not see the gorilla at all!

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo.

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Expectations influence what we see.

These data show an influence of higherlevel processes (attention,
expectations, etc.) on perception:
 This would be in favor of RLTC and RCTL.

“Material engagement theory considers
the processes by which human individuals
and communities engage with the material
world through actions that havesimultaneously a material reality and acognitive or intelligent component. It
is concerned with actions that aremeaningful and purposive. People’s
purposes as knowledgeable agents are theresult of social motivations that arise
in relation to a person’s worldview. So
these actions are at once both physicaland mental”
Renfrew 2007

“In humans, such actions are based (…)
upon culturally determined patterns oflearned behavior that are themselves the
product of human experience andinnovation over long trajectories oftime. Such actions may be regarded as
the result of human agency”
Renfrew 2007.

This permeates human life, from the mostdaily actions to the rarest ones
(material culture): Politeness, tools, food, buildings, etc.;
 Rituals,
institutions(religion,
government, etc.);
 Worldviews(including
cosmologicalrepresentations)andsymbolisminRenfrew reports that: The high cultures of Mesoamerica believedthat the world was divided in four
quarters, each associated with a color(red, black, yellow, or white), with thecenter of the world (blue or green)
divided by the path of the sun along an
east-west main axis. The cosmos was
divided between sky and earth: it was arealm imbued with sacred forces, such as
lightning.
Renfrew, 2007.

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RLTC makes sense on the material
engagement theory.
It makes the existence of single
overarching principles such asEverett’s IEP rather unlikely: One would more expect a whole set ofcircumscribed principles, each specificto a domain (economic exchanges, wedding,food, etc.) as the result of an
accumulation over long periods of time.
 However, such an accumulation might wellhave an effect on language, which in its
turn might have an effect on
categorization, discrimination andperception.

Language

CultureHowever the top-down influences onperception examined above arecontextual: They do not make us blind to gorillas or
to sofas in general: If we are not focused on a task in thegorilla video, we do see the gorilla; And of course, we do see sofas in normal
environments.

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