3 ms·

Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science

43 points by DrierCycle 11mo ago

amarant 11mo ago
Anecdotally, I think they're on to something! I've lived abroad enough to start thinking in a non-native language, I noticed that my thinking processes were different, and I would interpret even familiar situations differently. Best I can describe it is that I gained a new perspective.
lukasb 11mo ago
"Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more." Can they really distinguish between the impact of language on these domains rather than culture? It could be the language you speak, or it could be that you're surrounded exclusively by other people that operate this way.
- kayodelycaon 11mo ago
  French, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken across multiple cultures. So there should be enough data to test the theory. French is a second language for many countries. So that may provide data as well.
- djtango 11mo ago
  I mean I'm not really qualified or rigourous enough to prove this but if you have learned chinese and english it should be pretty damn obvious that it is linguistic. But in any case, human language and culture are intractable if you start trying to speak idiomatically. Sure maybe you could isolate a bunch of scholars and give them a specification of Chinese and ask them to go at it, which is maybe what we do with Latin and Greek. I would struggle to see how someone could earnestly argue the opposite, that language doesn't shape thought, when Chinese doesn't use conjugation, has looser notions of tense, has no direct/indirect article, uses glyphs instead of an alphabet, can be read top to bottom, right to left, left to right and doesn't use spaces to delimit words. That's even before we talk about tones or the highly monosyllabic nature of the language alters things like memorisation. (ever notice how Chinese people are often good at memorising numbers?)
mwigdahl 11mo ago
Wasn’t Sapir-Whorf pretty much debunked? Is there a difference in what is being claimed here or is it resurrecting it under a different name?
- dragonwriter 11mo ago
  This seems like the (broadly accepted, AFAIK) weak form of Sapir-Whorf (language has impacts on cognition) but not the (generally viewed as debunked) strong form (language places strict limits on the bounds of possible thought).
  - Kim_Bruning 11mo ago
    I'm actually on the fence about strong Sapir-Whorf now. It's rather suss that machines started exhibiting some form of <reasoning> capabilities the minute they could successfully parse natural language, and not a moment before.
- Mathnerd314 11mo ago
  To summarize the Wikipedia article on linguistic relativity, the "strong" hypothesis that language determines thought has been debunked. But there are many things that a language influences. To use a computer analogy, all mainstream programming languages are Turing complete, so you can express any computation in them. In this sense the language does not determine what programs you can write. But in practice, as any computer person will tell you, different languages are good at different things. And that is kind of this paper, they cite a lot of examples where English has poor vocabulary or odd quirks, and show by comparison to other languages that this measurably affects conclusions about certain cognitive abilities. The issue they're complaining about is like if you benchmarked Python programs and tried to draw conclusions about the speed limits of computing, but never tried C++ or assembly.
  - BenFranklin100 11mo ago
    Its ridiculous to compare human language to a programming language, even by analogy. They are entirely different domains.
whynotmaybe 11mo ago
> These induced biases are not confined to the visual modality; in auditory tests, speakers of left-to-right systems conceptualize time as flowing in that direction too. Any RTL native can confirm that they visualize time as flowing from right to left? Because this puzzles me a lot!
- chrisweekly 11mo ago
  For me it's neither. Time seems to flow from back to front, as if I'm seated in a chair moving backwards; I can see the past as it recedes (moving away in the direction I'm facing), and can't see the future (I'd need eyes in the back of my head).
marc_abonce 11mo ago
Intuitively, I agree with the thesis. But the example for Spanish confuses me. One of the illustrations says: "Absence of negatively biased mental verbs in English slows down the development of Theory of Mind. Children acquiring Spanish (which has verbs indicating false belief) have better performance in false-belief tasks." But as a Spanish speaker I don't know what verbs is this referring to. On top of my head I can only think of the word "disbelieve" which doesn't have an exact, single word translation, but that's the opposite of what the quote seems to imply. Other verbs like deceive, doubt, misunderstand or imagine do have matching translations in both languages. What am I missing here?
- canjobear 11mo ago
  They gave the example of the verb yiwei in Mandarin. If you say “ta yiwei X” it means “s/he thinks X” with a strong connotation that X is in fact false. The Spanish equivalent is supposed to be the verb creerse [1], like if you say “Juan se cree que lo van a ascender” it means “Juan thinks that they are going to promote him” but with a strong connotation that he won’t in fact be promoted. English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false. The claim (for what it’s worth, I am skeptical) is that English speakers are slower to learn the concept that someone can have a false belief, because English lacks such a verb. [1] according to https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/1256 https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/vie... for example. I don’t know enough Spanish to say if the verb really works this way. Verbs like this are called “contrafactive”
  - arjie 11mo ago
    Asking which-eth is hard in English but easy in Tamil. I’m going to tell everyone that this is why list.indexOf is slow.
  - whilenot-dev 11mo ago
    > English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false. How does yiwei/creerse differ from "Juan doubts that they are going to promote him"?
evanjrowley 11mo ago
I, for one, welcome our new Lojban-speaking overlords.
coliveira 11mo ago
As a speaker of a latin language I can attest that English is poor at achieving several meanings that come very naturally in Portuguese, for example. English being a simpler language requires that you add several particles to get a different meaning, while in other languages you can use the normal gramatical variations of words to achieve the same effect. Just as an example, there are ways to discriminate size in words using terminations such as "ão" and "inho" (among others), and these have meanings that are not exactly the ones you expect from grammar but depend on the word you're using.
- geuis 11mo ago
  Unlike many other languages, English has grown because it's adaptable. It has almost as many borrowed words for advanced concepts as "native" words. It's hard to even distinguish anymore. If anything, a solid counter argument can be made that Romance languages (descended from Latin) lack the flexibility of English and other Germanic languages. Non primary English speakers frequently complain that English is more complicated than other languages. This is true. I'm a native speaker and only can read limited Spanish. Where I get hung up is the dependence on gender of objects. Similar experience with Japanese when I was studying that a few years ago. I completely believe that primary language has a physical effect on the brain in terms of neural structure. It must have. But since English is so adaptable, if there's a concept that is better expressed in another language we tend to adopt the words of other languages to express it. However other languages seem to be less adaptable. For example, France has or had an official government ministry for decades to manage new foreign words entering the French language. To this day, there are newish specific French words for technologies coming from English speaking countries. Another good example is some YouTube videos from India I've run across. (I turn on subtitles). But say the speaker is talking in Hindi. Many times more technical terms are English words or phrases that are freely interspersed with Hindi. They're borrowing the English words, with a bit of a Hindi dialect hitting the pronunciation. Going back to Japanese, we see the same thing. I don't know if the JP gov has a language ministry. But if you look at written Japanese text you definitely see that most numerology is written with western/English 0-9 characters mixed with katakana or hiragana. When you hear people speaking, and once your ear is oriented towards Japanese sounds, you can start to pick up on the adopted English words that are said with a native dialect emphasis.
Animats 11mo ago
This section of the article is interesting: Philosopher Paul Grice suggested a handful of simple rules that apply ‘to conversation as such, regardless of its subject matter’ [106]. The Gricean individual is a rational agent who is expected to quickly provide just enough information, not more, nor less, than necessary and relevant in any given communicative situation. When such an individual flouts one of these principles, their interlocutors will infer the intended meaning of an utterance is different from its literal meaning. That's a useful observation. It brings out the problems of business-speak and political-speak. It isn't entirely a language distinction. It's possible to obfuscate and blither in many languages. Orwell observed this decades ago. Some languages seem to encourage it more than others, but that may be a linguistic style thing more than a language thing. LLMs are sometimes given prompt preludes to push them into a Gricean mode. Without an incentive, LLMs tend to go into stochastic parrot mode and blither.
corimaith 11mo ago
Strong Sapir-Whorf is debunked, and we do practically need a lingua franca that English does do okay at so why put in all the effort to change it now?

43 points by DrierCycle 11mo ago

Anecdotally, I think they're on to something! I've lived abroad enough to start thinking in a non-native language, I noticed that my thinking processes were different, and I would interpret even familiar situations differently. Best I can describe it is that I gained a new perspective.

lukasb 11mo ago

"Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more." Can they really distinguish between the impact of language on these domains rather than culture? It could be the language you speak, or it could be that you're surrounded exclusively by other people that operate this way.

kayodelycaon 11mo ago
French, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken across multiple cultures. So there should be enough data to test the theory. French is a second language for many countries. So that may provide data as well.
djtango 11mo ago
I mean I'm not really qualified or rigourous enough to prove this but if you have learned chinese and english it should be pretty damn obvious that it is linguistic. But in any case, human language and culture are intractable if you start trying to speak idiomatically. Sure maybe you could isolate a bunch of scholars and give them a specification of Chinese and ask them to go at it, which is maybe what we do with Latin and Greek. I would struggle to see how someone could earnestly argue the opposite, that language doesn't shape thought, when Chinese doesn't use conjugation, has looser notions of tense, has no direct/indirect article, uses glyphs instead of an alphabet, can be read top to bottom, right to left, left to right and doesn't use spaces to delimit words. That's even before we talk about tones or the highly monosyllabic nature of the language alters things like memorisation. (ever notice how Chinese people are often good at memorising numbers?)

mwigdahl 11mo ago

Wasn’t Sapir-Whorf pretty much debunked? Is there a difference in what is being claimed here or is it resurrecting it under a different name?

dragonwriter 11mo ago
This seems like the (broadly accepted, AFAIK) weak form of Sapir-Whorf (language has impacts on cognition) but not the (generally viewed as debunked) strong form (language places strict limits on the bounds of possible thought).
- Kim_Bruning 11mo ago
  I'm actually on the fence about strong Sapir-Whorf now. It's rather suss that machines started exhibiting some form of <reasoning> capabilities the minute they could successfully parse natural language, and not a moment before.
Mathnerd314 11mo ago
To summarize the Wikipedia article on linguistic relativity, the "strong" hypothesis that language determines thought has been debunked. But there are many things that a language influences. To use a computer analogy, all mainstream programming languages are Turing complete, so you can express any computation in them. In this sense the language does not determine what programs you can write. But in practice, as any computer person will tell you, different languages are good at different things. And that is kind of this paper, they cite a lot of examples where English has poor vocabulary or odd quirks, and show by comparison to other languages that this measurably affects conclusions about certain cognitive abilities. The issue they're complaining about is like if you benchmarked Python programs and tried to draw conclusions about the speed limits of computing, but never tried C++ or assembly.
- BenFranklin100 11mo ago
  Its ridiculous to compare human language to a programming language, even by analogy. They are entirely different domains.

whynotmaybe 11mo ago

> These induced biases are not confined to the visual modality; in auditory tests, speakers of left-to-right systems conceptualize time as flowing in that direction too. Any RTL native can confirm that they visualize time as flowing from right to left? Because this puzzles me a lot!

chrisweekly 11mo ago
For me it's neither. Time seems to flow from back to front, as if I'm seated in a chair moving backwards; I can see the past as it recedes (moving away in the direction I'm facing), and can't see the future (I'd need eyes in the back of my head).

marc_abonce 11mo ago

Intuitively, I agree with the thesis. But the example for Spanish confuses me. One of the illustrations says: "Absence of negatively biased mental verbs in English slows down the development of Theory of Mind. Children acquiring Spanish (which has verbs indicating false belief) have better performance in false-belief tasks." But as a Spanish speaker I don't know what verbs is this referring to. On top of my head I can only think of the word "disbelieve" which doesn't have an exact, single word translation, but that's the opposite of what the quote seems to imply. Other verbs like deceive, doubt, misunderstand or imagine do have matching translations in both languages. What am I missing here?

canjobear 11mo ago
They gave the example of the verb yiwei in Mandarin. If you say “ta yiwei X” it means “s/he thinks X” with a strong connotation that X is in fact false. The Spanish equivalent is supposed to be the verb creerse [1], like if you say “Juan se cree que lo van a ascender” it means “Juan thinks that they are going to promote him” but with a strong connotation that he won’t in fact be promoted. English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false. The claim (for what it’s worth, I am skeptical) is that English speakers are slower to learn the concept that someone can have a false belief, because English lacks such a verb. [1] according to https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/view/1256 https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/vie... for example. I don’t know enough Spanish to say if the verb really works this way. Verbs like this are called “contrafactive”
- arjie 11mo ago
  Asking which-eth is hard in English but easy in Tamil. I’m going to tell everyone that this is why list.indexOf is slow.
- whilenot-dev 11mo ago
  > English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false. How does yiwei/creerse differ from "Juan doubts that they are going to promote him"?

evanjrowley 11mo ago

I, for one, welcome our new Lojban-speaking overlords.

coliveira 11mo ago

As a speaker of a latin language I can attest that English is poor at achieving several meanings that come very naturally in Portuguese, for example. English being a simpler language requires that you add several particles to get a different meaning, while in other languages you can use the normal gramatical variations of words to achieve the same effect. Just as an example, there are ways to discriminate size in words using terminations such as "ão" and "inho" (among others), and these have meanings that are not exactly the ones you expect from grammar but depend on the word you're using.

geuis 11mo ago
Unlike many other languages, English has grown because it's adaptable. It has almost as many borrowed words for advanced concepts as "native" words. It's hard to even distinguish anymore. If anything, a solid counter argument can be made that Romance languages (descended from Latin) lack the flexibility of English and other Germanic languages. Non primary English speakers frequently complain that English is more complicated than other languages. This is true. I'm a native speaker and only can read limited Spanish. Where I get hung up is the dependence on gender of objects. Similar experience with Japanese when I was studying that a few years ago. I completely believe that primary language has a physical effect on the brain in terms of neural structure. It must have. But since English is so adaptable, if there's a concept that is better expressed in another language we tend to adopt the words of other languages to express it. However other languages seem to be less adaptable. For example, France has or had an official government ministry for decades to manage new foreign words entering the French language. To this day, there are newish specific French words for technologies coming from English speaking countries. Another good example is some YouTube videos from India I've run across. (I turn on subtitles). But say the speaker is talking in Hindi. Many times more technical terms are English words or phrases that are freely interspersed with Hindi. They're borrowing the English words, with a bit of a Hindi dialect hitting the pronunciation. Going back to Japanese, we see the same thing. I don't know if the JP gov has a language ministry. But if you look at written Japanese text you definitely see that most numerology is written with western/English 0-9 characters mixed with katakana or hiragana. When you hear people speaking, and once your ear is oriented towards Japanese sounds, you can start to pick up on the adopted English words that are said with a native dialect emphasis.

Animats 11mo ago

This section of the article is interesting: Philosopher Paul Grice suggested a handful of simple rules that apply ‘to conversation as such, regardless of its subject matter’ [106]. The Gricean individual is a rational agent who is expected to quickly provide just enough information, not more, nor less, than necessary and relevant in any given communicative situation. When such an individual flouts one of these principles, their interlocutors will infer the intended meaning of an utterance is different from its literal meaning. That's a useful observation. It brings out the problems of business-speak and political-speak. It isn't entirely a language distinction. It's possible to obfuscate and blither in many languages. Orwell observed this decades ago. Some languages seem to encourage it more than others, but that may be a linguistic style thing more than a language thing. LLMs are sometimes given prompt preludes to push them into a Gricean mode. Without an incentive, LLMs tend to go into stochastic parrot mode and blither.

corimaith 11mo ago

Strong Sapir-Whorf is debunked, and we do practically need a lingua franca that English does do okay at so why put in all the effort to change it now?