Language may influence cognition

If you ask an American or German to describe the way a person might enter a room, you might get a lengthy list of what researchers call 'manner verbs.' Someone could saunter, jog, hop, slither, crawl or jump into the room.

But manner verbs aren?t as common in other languages, so their speakers are left with less descriptive verbs such as 'went,' 'enter' and 'walk.' These structural differences in languages, argues Alison Gopnik, PhD, can influence how people think about and approach the world. She detailed examples of research that supports this idea at a symposium on language at APA?s 1998 Annual Convention.

Research by Dan Slobin, PhD, for example, finds that English and German speakers pay much more attention to the manner in which people and objects move? wriggling, jogging, bounding?than do people who speak French or Spanish. These languages differ in their use of manner verbs. English and German have many different manner verbs, whereas it?s uncommon and, indeed, difficult to speak about manner of movement in the Romance languages, said Gopnik, a professor in the philosophy department at the University of California at Berkeley.

A language?s structure may also influence children?s cognitive development, said Gopnik. To examine this, she and Soonja Choi followed groups of American and Korean children as they learned their first words. Korean emphasizes verbs much more than English, and this is reflected in how mothers speak to their babies English-speaking children learn more nouns as their first words and Korean children learn more verbs.

To see if this difference in language development affected cognitive development, Gopnik and Choi examined children?s understanding of tool use and object categorization, two skills that develop at the same time words are developing.

The children in the different language groups had opposite patterns of development in these two areas. The Korean children consistently solved tool-use problems before the English-speaking children and vice versa.

'It wasn?t that somehow the English speakers were simply better than the Korean speakers or vice versa,' said Gopnik. 'There was something specific about the particular areas of development which seemed to be linked to the particular kinds of language the children were exposed to.'

In fact, word acquisition appears to be linked in time to the ability to solve the cognitive problems, said Gopnik. Children learned to solve a tool-use problem within a couple of weeks of learning a word relevant to tool use. And children began to sort objects within a couple of weeks of a huge increase in the number of nouns they knew.

'That pattern was the same for both groups, but which one came first differed depending on the language they heard,' she said.

'The kinds of language the children were hearing were influencing the kinds of language they were using themselves,' said Gopnik. 'And, in turn, the kinds of language they were using themselves seemed to be influencing the kinds of cognitive problems they were solving and when they were solving them.'

?Beth Azar