Language and thought: The relativity issue in the light of contemporary psycholinguistics Talk at th

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Language and thought The relativity issue in the
light of contemporary psycholinguisticsTalk at
the Cultures in interaction conference, 6th
European Congresss International Association for
Cross-Cultural Pychology, Budapest, 12th July,
2003

• Csaba Pléh
• Center for Cognitive Science, Budapest U. of
  Technology and Economics
• pleh_at_itm.bme.hu

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Universality and relativity in perspective

• Hermeneutic circle in Whorfian reasoning
• Different surfaces in the language-thought
  interface
• Research vogues relative- univ- relative
• Processing relativity
• Language of space brain to culture
• Disorders, languages and brains

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Whorfian circles

• Language determines thought
• This is seen in differences of expressions in
  different languages
• Lexical and grammatical relativity
• Trivially circular need for behavioral measures
• Language, thought, and determines issues

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Research fashions over half century

• 50s large differences, overall relativity
• Chomskyan revolution universalism and
  modularity, no determination
• 80s typological differences, parameters,
  processing types
• Recently constrained relativity and
  contextualized universality

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Processing relativity

• Languages differ in the way they approach the
  linguistic taks of understanding
• Language-to-language relativity
• Languages also differ in their use of universal
  resources
• Debates on when and how this is fixed

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An example Interpretation of simple transitive
sentences, Bates - MacWhinney, 1989, competition
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Explanatory power of factors in Hungarian

• Var Expl

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Learning the saliency of case and unlearning
animacy in Hungarian
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Consequences of an increased role of morphology
(Gergely and Pléh)

• Rich morphology
• Fast decisions
• Non-configurational
• Localistic model
• Memory over words

• Poor morphology
• Slow decisons
• Configurational
• Holistic model
• Memory over phrases

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Language and space Universal and specific

• The model of Landau-Jackendoff
• 100 spatial markers, low shape sensitivity
  DORSAL STREAM
• 10.000 nouns, high shape sensitivity VENTRAL
  STREAM
• Universal features, some variations

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Main issues in our space language research

• Theoretical background Jackendoff and Landau
  (1993)
• The early use pattern container and goal
  preference
• Artificial spatial markers primacy of goals and
  the ease of suffixes
• Dissociation between language of space and
  agreemnt morphology in WMS

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The language of space in Hungarian

• Suffixes, postpositions and object part names in
  the NPs
• Obligatory distinctions along the path
• Three markers for GOAL, SOURCE, LOCATION
• Prefix system in VPs (in-go,out-go etc.)

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Preference for GOALS in earliest use

• From the data of MacWhinney (1978)
• distribution of 612 spatial suffixes, betwwen
  18 an 24
• (Pléh, Vinkler and Kálmán, 1996)

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Artificial spatial language-learning paradigm

• Children between 36 and 56
• Learn artificial
• suffixes
• part names
• postpositions
• With different visual targets
• vertical
• diagonal
• under
• With different path directionality

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Visual arrangements for learning artificial
spatial terms
UNDER
VERTICAL
DIAGONAL
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Learning of three spatial expression types and
age

• Clear learning in suffixes
• Increases with age
• Postpositions and part names are more difficult

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The effect of visual relation on learning

• Vertical is by far the easiest to learn
• Diagonal is not learned
• Part name is learnable with under

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GOAL preference in artificial spatial markers
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Some aspects of goal preference

• GOAL preference is strong
• It is strong with postpositions as well
• It becomes stronger with age

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Arrangement for the perspective reversal task
(Levinson)
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Percent of egocentric choice
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Some relevance of the reversal task

• The language related egocentric choice develops
• It has many contextual determinants
• A simple reletivity cannot be hold here

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Disordered populations and cross-linguistic
comparisons

• Is the behavioral disorder the same in different
  language contexts ?
• Williams syndrome spatial disorder
• good language
  
• How is space language effected?
• The relevance of Hungarian more qualitative data
  

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Spatial morphology and the role of trajectory
(Ágnes Lukács)
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Some tentative conclusions

• Languages differ in the language processing
  strategies they use, and this is related to the
  use of common resources according to language
  structure.
• Language shapes the selection between alternative
  representations, but is not the source of these
  representations. Space preferences are formed
  prelinguistically.
• Comparative studies help us to clarify the issue
  of qualitative disorders in the case of some
  developmental pathologies.