Language and thought

[toorsdenote]

I feel silly for not really pondering this question before, and for not having a ready answer to it, but: do we think in language?

A few days ago my friend who lives in Japan send me a video he'd taken, during part of which he can be heard talking to himself in Japanese. (He opens a door in a prospective apartment and says, "Ah, toire.") I was curious whether he was talking to himself in Japanese as a way to practice the language or because he actually thinks in Japanese. Did he open the door and think "toire," or did he think "bathroom" and then translate?

Or are those both wrong? Did he open the door and have a concept or thought or feeling of bathroomness which is only then translated into a word at all, such that the concept of "thinking in English" or "thinking in Japanese" is meaningless in the first place?

I feel certain that several readers of this blog will have learned or thought about this before. I am finding myself flummoxed by not being able to work out whether I think in English or not.

Certainly some words seem to be very closely tied to the experience that they convey. Sometimes Zoe briefly wakes up between sleep cycles and is angry at the prospect of waking up. (Join the club, kid.) When she was tiny, she used to just cry in those moments. Now she says "NO!" or sometimes "Uh-oh." (Once she woke up as I was moving her from the car seat to her stroller and, with her eyes still closed, she both said and signed "All done" -- clearly meaning "Cut it out, Mama.") It has been interesting to see that, even when she's not fully conscious, a word rather than a cry has become her instinctive expression of a strong feeling. But is that the same as thinking in language, or is language always layered on top of the feeling or thought itself?

Comments

[gwillen.livejournal.com]

This is one of those questions that has had many, many words written about it, with no real solid conclusions drawn. It's entirely possible that this is something that differs for different people, or even for the same people over time. I suspect it's "some of each" for most people.

[ikeepaleopard]

Some of each seems the obvious answer (as it often does). The experience of understanding something but not having the words for it, seems like a pretty clear case of thought without word though.

[toorsdenote.livejournal.com]

That's true. Even as I was writing the above post, I spent a while struggling with how to say the last sentence. I obviously had in mind the symbolic meaning, not the words, of an experience layered on top of another experience, but I feel like there's a more obvious way to say that that I couldn't come up with.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_tove/]

Yeah, this is pretty close to my experience, except that there are also times when I am thinking about things I don't have words for, but they are spatial things. In that case, an analogous thing happens, which is that I consciously visualize the thing. By "consciously," I mean I may have to close my eyes to focus, or even move my hands around in the air. This feels to me very similar to having to deliberately cast thoughts into words. When I am making something that is going to involve multiple steps, I definitely tend to sort of play animations in my head of the thing coming together, the idea being to spot in advance where the problems are going to be. Likewise, electrical engineers can look at circuit diagrams and "see" the flow of electricity. So these are cases where "pure" thought is being processed through the learned brain-wiring which is vision.

I certainly usually think in English if I'm thinking in language at all; very occasionally, I will try head-narrating in French, as sort of a "how much of this language do I remember." I don't think it's thought-to-English-to-French, but it is thought-to-not-very-good-French, with lots of verb tense revising.

[ikeepaleopard]

I visualize consciously to figure out which way I'm gonna be facing when I get out of a subway station. I imagine four corners, highlight (whatever that means here) the one I'm gonna be on according to the sign, then rotate reality onto the map once I'm up.