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Linguistic Relativity Rides Again

 
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buravirgil



Joined: 23 Jan 2014
Posts: 967
Location: Jiangxi Province, China

PostPosted: Wed Mar 18, 2015 7:11 am    Post subject: Linguistic Relativity Rides Again Reply with quote

The abstract from the NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information) stating
    Two Languages, Two Minds: Flexible Cognitive Processing Driven by Language of Operation. Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.

Or, from Science Magazine, a less technical description of the study.

But researchers who doubt that language plays a central role in thinking are likely to remain skeptical. The artificial laboratory setting may make people rely on language more than they normally would, says cognitive psychologist Barbara Malt of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. “In a real-world situation, I could find reasons to pay attention to the continuity of an action and other reasons where I would pay attention to the endpoint,” she says. “Nothing says I have to be a bilingual to do that … It doesn’t mean language is the lens through which I see the world.”
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