Notes

  • Whorfian hypothesis - language influences thinking
  • native language helps us determine computational costs of different cognitive processes, and it influences ways of thinking - ex international students convert thoughts from native language into English and then share it
  • more camel names, rice names - thought influenced language in this case
  • languages have different sounds, vocabularies, structures
  • aboriginal community in Australia don’t have left and right in their language, they use cardinal directions in their everyday communication
  • cognitive ability across languages changes
  • time is locked on landscape
  • number trick - 8 penguins not all languages have translation of numbers
  • languages differ in dividing color spectrum as well - lots in some , others have just “light” & “dark”, ex - Russians have separate terms of differentiating differ colors, when analyzed they are faster in differentiating colors compared to others
  • surprised reaction in brain as color changes from light to dark color shift - categorical shift , no such brain activity for native English speakers
  • structural quirks - sun masculine in India, feminine in German, it impacts how they describe things ( day-to-day interactions, poetry, song writing etc.)
  • people pay attention to different things based on how their language shapes them - (English focusing on who did it, Spanish focusing on the event ) → language guides reasoning
  • basic perceptual decisions, we make them every moment , languages slightly tweak the final decision
  • linguistic diversity reveals how flexible our human mind is
  • As a trilingual, you watch movies from three different countries, read books from three different languages, learn cultures of three origins, and forge relationships with from diverse cultures. Indeed, when you learn a new language, you acquire a new reality of something different, or a soul. Knowing more than one or two languages also helps you understand the history of humanity and how some cultures and people act and think in different ways.

  1. Cognitive Psychology of HCI

References

  1. How language shapes the way we think | Lera Boroditsky | TED - YouTube