Psych 56L/ Ling 51: Acquisition of LanguageAnnouncementsA Recap from Sound PerceptionSapir Whorf HypothesisDegrees of WhorfianismDifferent Whorfian QuestionsLanguage as Category MakerPowerPoint Presentation2 Other Dimensions of ColorSlide 10Slide 11Slide 12Slide 13Slide 14Language Influencing Perception in Color?Slide 16Slide 17Slide 18Eliminating the Verbal Encoding of Color (Roberson & Davidoff 2000)Slide 20Categorical Color Perception?Language as a Lens: possible evidenceSpatial Frames of ReferenceSlide 24Munnich, Landau & Dosher (2001)Slide 26Features of Motion EventsSlide 28Gennari, Sloman, Malt & Fitch (2002)Slide 30Language as Lens?Spatial Categorization: Crosslinguistic DifferencesSlide 33McDonough, Choi, & Mandler (2003)Spatial Categorization: Language as Lens?Language as a ToolkitNavigationSlide 38But can toddlers really not do it?Slide 40So when does this ability develop?Is language really responsible?Slide 43Slide 44Is language really necessary?So language does seem to play a very important role in the ability to combine information from different core knowledge systems. (Perhaps not absolutely necessary, but extraordinarily helpful - kind of like motherese for language development.) Or maybe rhesus monkeys are just clever enough to do this without the spatial language that humans seem to rely on.Questions?Psych 56L/ Ling 51:Acquisition of LanguageLecture 14Language & Cognition(The Whirlwind Tour)AnnouncementsIf you haven’t turned in homework 2, you can still do so for late credit. This is highly encouraged because zeroes are bad.Review questions available for language and cognition (though we will probably finish up this topic on Monday)Homework 3 officially assigned; due Monday 12/1/08Reminder: No class 11/26/08We do “hear” language sounds differently depending on what language we speak. But when we fail to hear a contrast that a speaker of another language does hear, it isn’t because our physical ability to register the sound has disappeared. It’s because we have learned that that type of contrast is not a meaningful contrast for our language.Our mental representations of the sounds of words are an abstraction of the physical signal. (ex: Dental d and retroflex D sound the same to English speakers, but sound different to Hindi speakers.) We hear language “through a lens”A Recap from Sound PerceptionSapir Whorf HypothesisThe structure of one’s language influences the manner in which one perceives and understands the world. Therefore, speakers of different languages will perceive the world differently.“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end, we shall make thought crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it…” - George Orwell, 1984QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressorare needed to see this picture.Degrees of WhorfianismLinguistic Determinism (strong Whorfianism) = Language determines our perception of the worldLinguistic Relativism (weak Whorfianism) = Language biases our perception of the worldSound perception supports linguistic relativism since there is evidence that the changes imposed by language are not permanent or insurmountable. (Adults can learn to hear non-native sound contrasts.)Different Whorfian QuestionsLanguage as a Category Maker: Does the language we acquire influence where we make our category distinctions?Language as a Lens: Do grammatical characteristics of a language shape speakers’ perceptions of the world?Language as a Toolkit: Does language augment our capacity for reasoning and representation?Language as Category Maker(1) Sound inventory of a language and perception of speech sounds in native & foreign languages(2) Color terms and color perceptionQuickTime™ and a decompressorare needed to see this picture.QuickTime™ and a decompressorare needed to see this picture.QuickTime™ and a decompressorare needed to see this picture.Contrastive sound categories formed based on data in languageThe Physical Stimulus for Colorhue “wavelength”Oscillation frequency oflight radiationbrightnesssaturationintensitypurity2 Other Dimensions of ColorAmplitude oflight radiationIntensity of dominantwavelength, relative toentire light signalRange of Color: Maunsell color chipshuebrightnessHow English speakers tend to divide these upHow do other languages divide the colors?Debi RobersonU. of Essex, UKJules DavidofU. of London, UKBerinmo tribeNew GuineaEnglishBerinmo(Davidof 2001)EnglishBerinmo(Davidof 2001)Language Influencing Perception in Color?Berinmo divides the color space differently than English.Do Berinmo speakers perceive color differently?If categorical effects are restricted to linguistic boundaries, the 2 populations should show markedly different responses across the 2 category boundaries (green-blue and nol-wor)If categorical effects are determined by the universal properties of the visual system, then both populations should show the same response patterns.EnglishBerinmo(Davidof 2001)Within categoryWithin categoryAcross categoryAcross categoryTest using Maunsell color chips from these rangesCategorical Perception ResultsEnglish speakers showed significantly superior recognition for targets from across-category pairs than for those from within-category pairs for the green-blue boundary, but not for the nol-wor boundary. Berinmo speakers had the opposite pattern. Implication: Categorical perception for color, so linguistic relativity in the domain of color, too.But maybe this is a result of people naming the colors in order to make their decision. So the effect of language is not on perception of color but on strategy for encoding color.Eliminating the Verbal Encoding of Color(Roberson & Davidoff 2000)Subjects were shown a color and then asked to read color words (verbal interference) or look at a multicolored dot pattern (visual interference) Subjects then shown 2 color chips - the original color and one that was 1 or 2 color chips away - and asked which was the original colorWithin category identificationAcross category identificationVerbal interference only affects across-category identification. This suggests that subjects are using language to help them make decisions about colors that fall into different linguistic categories. Eliminating the Verbal Encoding of Color(Roberson & Davidoff 2000)Categorical Color Perception?Conclusion: While language does have an effect on the way humans interact with color, it does