5 ms·

Whorfian effects are generally extremely small. If you speak Russian you might be able to discriminate certain shades of blue around 50 ms faster than if you sp

Whorfian effects are generally extremely small. If you speak Russian you might be able to discriminate certain shades of blue around 50 ms faster than if you speak English. Maybe language has some low-level effects, but there is no evidence for anything dramatic.

whatshisface 8y ago
That might not even be a Whorfian effect. Perhaps the act of learning the word for a color involves spending time looking at the color, as well as practice at identifying it, so you prime your visual system in a way that could happen even without language. I propose that if you gave someone wordless practice with a color (for example by asking them to sort objects) they would see all of the same time improvements.
- jonahx 8y ago
  The article address this objection: """ To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories. """
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    I don't think it does it well. Compare the Russians to someone who does the task regularly in English, say a graphic designer. My guess is the differences will go away when you compare someone who practices it regularly to them.
mlevental 8y ago
what? why? i speak russian and can't imagine why this would be the case.
- myth_drannon 8y ago
  English has only blue, Russian has goluboi and sini. You can plenty of research on that.
  - whatshisface 8y ago
    English also has Azure, Denim and Cyan.
    - MR4D 8y ago
      And cobalt and sapphire. :)
    - trott 8y ago
      The sky is blue. The flag is red, white and blue. To a Russian speaker, calling these colors by the same name seems absurd.
      - hsv 8y ago
        well, arguably, navy versus cornflower would handily cover pedantic differentiation, as needed. put another way, one can easily counter that the flag and the sky handily share similar saturation of the same hue, differentiated only by the value of darkness. take it one step further, and the sky at dusk will drop its brightness, and even if only for a moment, match the flag’s deeper blue, until the sun completely sets and the night sky becomes black, when not contaminated by light pollution.
        trott 8y ago
        My point was that, the way the language is actually used by its speakers, "blue" is more general than either of its two Russian translations.
powerapple 8y ago
Culture is embedded in language, which influences the way you think, your brain, your emotion and your behaviour. People speaking A language embraces B culture, and people in B culture does C thing. Instead of saying B -> C, trying to explain it with A -> C is not the right thing to do.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  It's more the other way around I feel. Language is the mark of culture, not the other way. Ppl who have a certain cultural attitude use language to reflect that.
jcranmer 8y ago
The real problem with a lot of these studies is that it's difficult to distinguish between a linguistic effect versus a cultural effect--does the language distinguish terms because the linguistic community wishes to do so frequently, or does the distinct terms within the language cause the linguistic community to distinguish the terminology? It is my opinion that, most of the time, if not all, it is the culture driving the language. I think one interesting example of where the linguistic hints is overridden by the cultural milieu is in the term ski mask. Picture someone wearing a ski mask; what is he about to do: ski down the mountain, or rob a bank? I suspect most people associate the ski mask more readily with a bank robber (particularly the three-hole variant) than a warm weather gear that you might use if the windchill is going to be below 0°F. (I personally use the term balaclava instead of ski mask, though I know there's a large segment of the population who doesn't know what a balaclava is). In that case, the linguistic clue of "ski" is less important than the fact that the main context people see it in is when people are concealing their identities to rob banks in movies.
- jonahx 8y ago
  This quote from the article suggests that mechanism involved is specifically linguistic: """ To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories. """
- dorchadas 8y ago
  Thank you for posting this. It's always my biggest complaint about Linguistic Relativity... And that so many people believe it simply because it seems like it must be true. Boroditsky (who I associate with the strong push to push it on the public) and her ilk have done a lot of harm, as this does directly impact thinking in terms of things like AAVE, which we've already seen causes transcription errors in court leading to many issues.
jonahx 8y ago
This is just a toy experiment that shows causal relationships between thought and language can exist. You can't look at the arbitrary number of 50ms and say, "Well, it seems small, the effects aren't important." The point is that influence is there, working away all the time in thousands of ways we don't understand. Maybe it all adds up to nothing. But the "small differences" in experiments like these don't prove that. You could have hugely important global effects while still seeing small experimental differences for something like reaction time to shades of blue.
- canjobear 8y ago
  The entire experimental literature on linguistic relativity is characterized by tiny effects and failures to replicate. Maybe the tiny, inconsistent effects do add up to something. Maybe there are hugely important global effects. But no one has ever identified them in a reproducible way.
  - jonahx 8y ago
    Fair enough. I just noticed this is your field. So is it your opinion that Sapir Whorf is fundamentally just not true? What is happening when we learn a new concept or new word and start seeing things differently or noticing something more often? In your opinion what is the correct way to think about that if it's not language influencing thought/perception?
    - canjobear 8y ago
      I do think language has a dramatic effect on thought, with the caveat that most human languages are pretty much similar in what they are capable of expressing, because all human languages serve basically the same purposes. So when you learn a new concept via language, it can have a dramatic effect on your life. But whether you learn it in English or Russian isn't going to make a huge difference, because they aren't that different in terms of what they can express easily. For example, if you take examples of so-called "untranslateable" words, usually you can translate them pretty easily. German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home. No direct English equivalent, yet I was able to express it in English in a few words with no trouble. We have yet to find a word which is completely untranslateable, or a word in one language which could only be translated into another language by means of hundreds and hundreds of words. So language can have a big effect without the differences between human languages being so important. Similar logic to the Invariance Theorem for Kolmogorov complexity[0], which essentially states that the programming language you use to calculate the complexity (description length) of an object doesn't matter much, because Turing-complete languages can all simulate each other. Human languages are capable of simulating each other very well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invariance_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invarian...
sametmax 8y ago
Lots of small subtle effects generally ends up with pretty big emerging phenomenons.
agumonkey 8y ago
As a programmer I still attribute a bit of weight to Sapir-Whorf. I understand there's nothing magic about it, but it's still a useful concept to know about. Point of view matters in your understanding of the world, words are often ways to massage said PoV.

whatshisface 8y ago

That might not even be a Whorfian effect. Perhaps the act of learning the word for a color involves spending time looking at the color, as well as practice at identifying it, so you prime your visual system in a way that could happen even without language. I propose that if you gave someone wordless practice with a color (for example by asking them to sort objects) they would see all of the same time improvements.

jonahx 8y ago
The article address this objection: """ To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories. """
- dorchadas 8y ago
  I don't think it does it well. Compare the Russians to someone who does the task regularly in English, say a graphic designer. My guess is the differences will go away when you compare someone who practices it regularly to them.

mlevental 8y ago

what? why? i speak russian and can't imagine why this would be the case.

myth_drannon 8y ago
English has only blue, Russian has goluboi and sini. You can plenty of research on that.
- whatshisface 8y ago
  English also has Azure, Denim and Cyan.
  - MR4D 8y ago
    And cobalt and sapphire. :)
  - trott 8y ago
    The sky is blue. The flag is red, white and blue. To a Russian speaker, calling these colors by the same name seems absurd.
    - hsv 8y ago
      well, arguably, navy versus cornflower would handily cover pedantic differentiation, as needed. put another way, one can easily counter that the flag and the sky handily share similar saturation of the same hue, differentiated only by the value of darkness. take it one step further, and the sky at dusk will drop its brightness, and even if only for a moment, match the flag’s deeper blue, until the sun completely sets and the night sky becomes black, when not contaminated by light pollution.
      - trott 8y ago
        My point was that, the way the language is actually used by its speakers, "blue" is more general than either of its two Russian translations.

powerapple 8y ago

Culture is embedded in language, which influences the way you think, your brain, your emotion and your behaviour. People speaking A language embraces B culture, and people in B culture does C thing. Instead of saying B -> C, trying to explain it with A -> C is not the right thing to do.

dorchadas 8y ago
It's more the other way around I feel. Language is the mark of culture, not the other way. Ppl who have a certain cultural attitude use language to reflect that.

jcranmer 8y ago

The real problem with a lot of these studies is that it's difficult to distinguish between a linguistic effect versus a cultural effect--does the language distinguish terms because the linguistic community wishes to do so frequently, or does the distinct terms within the language cause the linguistic community to distinguish the terminology? It is my opinion that, most of the time, if not all, it is the culture driving the language. I think one interesting example of where the linguistic hints is overridden by the cultural milieu is in the term ski mask. Picture someone wearing a ski mask; what is he about to do: ski down the mountain, or rob a bank? I suspect most people associate the ski mask more readily with a bank robber (particularly the three-hole variant) than a warm weather gear that you might use if the windchill is going to be below 0°F. (I personally use the term balaclava instead of ski mask, though I know there's a large segment of the population who doesn't know what a balaclava is). In that case, the linguistic clue of "ski" is less important than the fact that the main context people see it in is when people are concealing their identities to rob banks in movies.

jonahx 8y ago
This quote from the article suggests that mechanism involved is specifically linguistic: """ To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories. """
dorchadas 8y ago
Thank you for posting this. It's always my biggest complaint about Linguistic Relativity... And that so many people believe it simply because it seems like it must be true. Boroditsky (who I associate with the strong push to push it on the public) and her ilk have done a lot of harm, as this does directly impact thinking in terms of things like AAVE, which we've already seen causes transcription errors in court leading to many issues.

jonahx 8y ago

This is just a toy experiment that shows causal relationships between thought and language can exist. You can't look at the arbitrary number of 50ms and say, "Well, it seems small, the effects aren't important." The point is that influence is there, working away all the time in thousands of ways we don't understand. Maybe it all adds up to nothing. But the "small differences" in experiments like these don't prove that. You could have hugely important global effects while still seeing small experimental differences for something like reaction time to shades of blue.

canjobear 8y ago
The entire experimental literature on linguistic relativity is characterized by tiny effects and failures to replicate. Maybe the tiny, inconsistent effects do add up to something. Maybe there are hugely important global effects. But no one has ever identified them in a reproducible way.
- jonahx 8y ago
  Fair enough. I just noticed this is your field. So is it your opinion that Sapir Whorf is fundamentally just not true? What is happening when we learn a new concept or new word and start seeing things differently or noticing something more often? In your opinion what is the correct way to think about that if it's not language influencing thought/perception?
  - canjobear 8y ago
    I do think language has a dramatic effect on thought, with the caveat that most human languages are pretty much similar in what they are capable of expressing, because all human languages serve basically the same purposes. So when you learn a new concept via language, it can have a dramatic effect on your life. But whether you learn it in English or Russian isn't going to make a huge difference, because they aren't that different in terms of what they can express easily. For example, if you take examples of so-called "untranslateable" words, usually you can translate them pretty easily. German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home. No direct English equivalent, yet I was able to express it in English in a few words with no trouble. We have yet to find a word which is completely untranslateable, or a word in one language which could only be translated into another language by means of hundreds and hundreds of words. So language can have a big effect without the differences between human languages being so important. Similar logic to the Invariance Theorem for Kolmogorov complexity[0], which essentially states that the programming language you use to calculate the complexity (description length) of an object doesn't matter much, because Turing-complete languages can all simulate each other. Human languages are capable of simulating each other very well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invariance_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invarian...

sametmax 8y ago

Lots of small subtle effects generally ends up with pretty big emerging phenomenons.

agumonkey 8y ago

As a programmer I still attribute a bit of weight to Sapir-Whorf. I understand there's nothing magic about it, but it's still a useful concept to know about. Point of view matters in your understanding of the world, words are often ways to massage said PoV.