Languages and Cognitions
What is language? The answer to this question is often obvious. Language is the way we communicate within a specific community and is both shaped by and influencing the culture that created it. More interestingly, I find out that language also influences our cognition, which is the way we perceive, think, and react to stimulus.
As a math major student, I work with numbers everyday. And it is saying that Chinese students are overall doing better calculations in math. Actually while doing homework with my foreign friends, I usually do the calculations and figure out the results more quickly. And then I find out that ability is associated with languages, which is also explained as cognitive load in psychology. That is to say, in Chinese, numbers from one to ten is pronounced in a single syllable, while in English, some numbers, for instances, seven has two syllables. While Chinese pronounce seven as “qi”, the less syllable means that it’s easier and takes less time for our brain to memorize and then do calculations whether with or without a pen. Seven, however, takes up some more cognitive load which means our brains need more time to process that word into math languages and then do the calculations. More specifically speaking, instead of calculating “seven multiply seventeen”, in Chinese I’m doing “qi cheng shiqi”, which sounds shorter and easier. So the language itself can have influence on how we deal with other topics.
Nevertheless, realizing that our language is shaping our awareness makes me curious about the topic, especially how it would influence our thought processes. While this example illustrates my experience with numbers, there are actual studies on how language affects our understanding of quantities. In the article “What Happens When a Language Has No Words for Numbers”, in fact, numbers in some cultures don’t have exact quantitative values, for instances, Amazonian people struggle to estimate and describe the exact time and number that they have in their head (Everett 2019). In other words, a person only learns numbers as one, two and others, but could not report three as three. They only have a very uncertain state between two and others, and could not quantify the time. So the lack of language would result in an unawareness of time, which is another interesting area associated specifically with the use of tense.
Language is also impacting people’s awareness of past, present, and future. Some languages, for instance, English, has a clear structure of tenses where the past, present, and future are implied during conversations. Chinese, on the other hand, doesn’t typically use tenses upon verbs. Adjectives and time descriptions usually are the tell-tales of tenses in Chinese, and it might lead to some misunderstandings sometimes if the speaker failed to make the time clear. According to Deutscher, people speaking languages without tenses have a less concrete sense of past and future (Deutscher 2010), which might potentially lead to comparatively lower motivation on planning of the future or reflecting on the past.
The relationship between the languages and cognitions is still on the way for more exploration, and the variety of cultures that we are seeing today, cannot exist if languages weren’t there to nurture it. Language gives us the ability to express, and without such expressions, there would be no effective communications, and humans will be no different than other animals in the universe.
