Language affects how we see the world. More than that, language affects what we see, even what we can see. If there is no word in the language for it, we’re less likely to see it.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology used twenty hues of blue to test for this perceptual quirk. They recruited fifty people, half native English speakers and half native Russian speakers, and had them try to match colored squares. They were shown a reference square of a particular shade of blue and asked which of two other squares, of slightly different shades, matched it. In one type of test the two squares were very similar, and in the other type of test they were more different.
The native English speakers did no better at distinguishing between the very different squares than they did with the very similar ones. The native Russian speakers were significantly faster at distinguishing between the notably darker and lighter squares than they were with the very similar ones. The difference is that Russian has different words altogether for dark blue and light blue, whereas English only modifies the word “blue” with “dark” and “light.” When the Russian speakers had to perform a difficult task that interfered with forming the words for the colors while they were taking the test, they did no better than the English speakers. That’s how language affects what we see.
Photo – slate.com
Language can also affect what we can say, and not just by the limitations of whatever language we’re using. Researchers at the Harvard Medical School performed a trial that showed that people who were severely verbally abused as children had reduced language skills as adults. Compared to people who weren’t abused, they also had ten percent reductions in the size of brain regions responsible for understanding both the tone and the meaning of what they hear. On tests they showed language skills reduced by about ten percent compared to the control group. Remember, there was no physical abuse, only verbal abuse.
Language is powerful.
rjb
Has a study been done on those who dished out the verbal abuse? In the one case that I know of, the verbal abuser now has dementia.
That sounds like a good premise for a study. If no one’s done it, somebody should. Best would be a large epidemiological study over a long time.
rjb
Back to the subject at hand, I see why Christianity has so many divisions and misunderstandings when our language of English is considered.
Not to mention what was lost in translation from Hebrew, Greek and Latin.
rjb
The translators all had their biases too.
When they said “blue,” what were they really seeing?
rjb
How many of the test groups were color blind, or at least shade blind?
From the study at MIT: “To determine each subject’s linguistic color boundary within the range of blues used in this work, we administered a brief color classification task at the end of the experiment (after the main color discrimination blocks). Subjects were asked to classify each color square used in this work as either goluboy or siniy (for Russian speakers) or light blue or dark blue (for English speakers). All subjects classified the lightest stimulus (stimulus 1 in Fig. 1) as goluboy or light blue and stimulus 20 as siniy or dark blue.”
So all the subjects were able to discriminate the shades of blue.
rjb