Language and thought
Feb. 27th, 2012 11:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
toorsdenoteI 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?
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?
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no subject
Date: 2012-02-29 12:53 pm (UTC)The researchers in this episode (one of whom runs The Baby Lab at Harvard) believes that language is what form synaptic connections in the brain to allow humans to relate objects/ideas/emotions to other objects/ideas/emotions. If I remember correctly, their example was that in a lab rat (or, a toddler) searching for a ball in a room with a spatial benchmark (I think they used one colored wall in a square room of otherwise white walls), that lab rat/toddler can have a symbolic or language-based notion of "ball" and of "colored wall."
However, to spatially locate that ball, it requires language of direction in relation to another benchmark ("the ball is left of the colored wall." One of the psychologists (Spelke, I think) concludes that rats/toddlers actually cannot think as a result of not having language to connect those two concepts.