THE BASES OF THE MIND:THE RELATIONSHIP OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein
Author: Assoc. Prof. Tilbe Göksun / College of Social Sciences and Humanities, Department of Psychology
How do we think without language? What interactions are involved in the complex relationship between language and thought? Are the limits of our language the same as those of our thinking?
The relationship between language and thought have been discussed and investigated by a broad range of scientists including linguists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and anthropologists. Language is a symbolic tool that we use to communicate our thoughts as well as represent our cognitive processes. Language is the mirror of thinking, and it is one of the ways in which we communicate our rich cognitive world. As Wittgenstein suggests, we may see the world within the boundaries of our language, and we think that way. Therefore, we can argue that the language we speak not only facilitates thought communication but also shapes and diversifies thinking.
Can we understand a concept that does not exist in our language?For example, the German word “schadenfreude” consists of the words “schaden (evil)” and “freude (pleasure), and it means “being pleased because others experience bad things.” Does it mean that we do not understand this feeling, or we have not experienced it because no word in English gives the same meaning? Above all, how can we think without language? More importantly, can we even think?
We can talk about three different interactions when we investigate the complex relationships between language and thinking. First, the existence of language as a cognitive process affects the system of thinking. Second, thinking comes before language, and the learning of a language interacts with the conceptual process that is formed before language use. Third, each language spoken may affect the system of thinking. Here we will discuss these three interactions under these subsections: “thinking without language,” “thinking before language,” and “thinking with language.”
THINKING WITHOUT LANGUAGE
Unlike animals, humans use language both for communication and for symbolic reasoning. This strengthens the argument that language facilitates concept formation. It is known that animals too communicate thoroughly, give warning cues in case of danger, imitate sounds, and communicate with hand gestures as observed with primates. Still, processes such as cause-effect relations and the acknowledgment of others’ thoughts, demands, and goals are believed to be more advanced in humans. For example, hearing-impaired children born to hearing parents, sometimes learn sign language with a delay. Such children can communicate with people inside the home using signs that they develop. However, it is only with a delay that they learn words to describe abstract cognitive and emotional notions such as understanding, thinking, and feeling. Additionally, it is shown it takes longer for them to comprehend the notion of mind, when compared to their peers who can hear and express abstract words.
Another example is about understanding numbers. The Piraha tribe in the Amazon uses a limited number of words that describe numbers. The tribe uses specific words for 1, 2, and 3. They label any number bigger than 3 as “a lot.” Research conducted with this tribe shows that the members have difficulty in numeric tests, especially in the calculation of absolute sizes. Deprivation of the number system in a language seems to affect calculation processes.
Unlike these examples, we see that thinking continues without verbal language. For example, people with aphasia who have trouble speaking due to brain damage can have complex thinking structures despite the problems in their expressing abilities. Our research conducted with brain-injured patients shows that they can express their thoughts in a non-verbal language when they do not have conceptual problems. For example, if spatial knowledge is still available in the brain, they can describe a route with hand gestures when asked.
Research shows the importance of language, especially a language that describes concepts in the emergence of cognitive processes. Despite language and thought being closely tied to each other, the expression of thought is not always achieved with words. People who have speech problems can express their thoughts in other ways using nonverbal communication.
THINKING BEFORE LANGUAGE
The best example to understand whether thought or cognitive processes exist before language is research on babies’ comprehension of concepts and how they may change with language. Babies can categorize objects and actions, understand the cause and effect relationship between events, and see the goals in a movement. Recent studies on action representation and spatial concepts have shown that babies’ universal and language-general action representation productively changes with the learning of the mother tongue. For example, languages use prepositions to express the relationship between objects, i.e., in, on, under. However, languages also vary how they use these relations. One of the most significant studies suggests that babies can differentiate between concepts expressed with prepositions such as containment (in) and support (on). The Korean language specifies the nature of these containment and support relationships using the tightness of the relationship between objects: tight or loose. For example, a pencil in a pencil-size box represents a tight relationship, while a pencil in a big basket represents a loose relationship. This is not a possible encoding in the English language. It has been found that while five-month-old babies in the USA were sensitive to the tight- loose relationship between objects, they lost this sensitivity around the age of 2.5. The same experiment repeated with Korean children showed they were sensitive both before and after they learn the language.
In short, while children universally perceive the different relationships of concepts, they differentiate notions expressed in their mother tongue and lose sensitivity in differentiating others as they learn their mother tongue. When they grow up, however, they can still learn such differences if they pay attention or if they receive training to do so.
THINKING WITH LANGUAGE
In the late 1800s, anthropologist Franz Boas laid the foundations of cultural relativity. According to this point of view, individuals see and perceive the world within the boundaries of their cultures. The role of anthropology is to investigate how people are conditioned by their culture and how they interact with the world in different ways. To understand such mechanisms, it suggests, implications in culture and language should be studied. The reflection of this view in the relationship between language and thought is the linguistic determinism hypothesis advanced by Eric Safir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. This hypothesis suggests that thought emerges only with the effect of language and concepts that are believed to exist even in infancy fade away due to the language learned. This hypothesis builds a pole among the diverse views on language and thought interaction. Today we see the reflection of this hypothesis on several views. One of them is the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which suggests that languages differ based on their linguistic structures as well as the words of which they consist.
According to the linguistic relativity hypothesis, the language we speak changes our perception of the world and shapes our concepts. In short, language is not used only for communication purposes. In this view, people speaking different languages have different world views. For example, the Russian and Greek languages identify shades of green and blue in detail and people speaking these languages can differentiate between such shades much more easily and with greater speed. A more striking example comes from languages that use gender in identifying objects. Languages such as Spanish, French, and German attribute gender to objects. More interestingly, an object with a female affix in a language may have a male affix in another language. For example, the word “key” has a male affix in German and a female affix in Spanish. Similarly, the word “bridge” has a female affix in German and a male affix in Spanish. These are random matches in a sense. People with mother tongues like German or Spanish take a test in English as their second language. Some proper nouns (i.e., Tom, Kathy) are matched with different object names, and participants are asked to learn these matches. Some matches are congruent with their mother tongue (if German, Tom — Key, both male), and some matches are incongruent (Tom — Bridge: male and female). The results show that people have difficulty in learning incongruent matches and therefore their attentional mechanisms may be affected by the specific structures in their languages. The essential takeaway is that this effect could be prominent and observed even in a test conducted in participants’ second languages. The language features some of the concepts or matches.
The other hypotheses on “the relation between language and thought” suggest that language does not have any significant effect on concepts while thinking. According to this view, the language we speak indirectly and/or temporarily affects our cognitive processes. Symbols specific to a language can affect only online thinking. While speaking, it is inevitable for people to use the notions expressed in their language. However, recent studies show that people speaking different languages that focus on separate aspects of an action (i.e., the manner of the action “hopping” or direction of the action “over”) have similar hand gestures that describe the direction of the action. These results suggest that language does not always affect thinking.
While children universally perceive the different relationships of concepts, they differentiate notions expressed in their mother tongue and lose sensitivity in differentiating others as they learn their mother tongue.
CONCLUSION
In conclusion, there is a nested relationship between language and thought. In the interaction processes mentioned above, the role of language changes. Even though the limits of our language are different from the limits of our thinking, it is inevitable that people prioritize concepts in their languages. This, however, does not mean that they cannot comprehend or think about concepts that do not exist in their language. Future research on abstract notions such as emotion transfer or expression of time will shed light on the interaction of language and thought.∆
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This article was originally published in the Frontier Magazine 13 th issue.
