Name: Theories of Language and Cognition
Uploaded: 2016-09-18T14:40:43.000Z
Duration: 5 min 7 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

then you know that some words don't translate exactly.

For example, there's a language in New Guinea that

meaning "bright," and mili, meaning "dark."

blue, green, teal, mauve, all that stuff.

But does the fact that we have different words for color

mean that we actually think about color differently?

And your answer to that question places you

on one position of the great language-thought debate.

And on one end, we have something called universalism.

This theory says that thought comes before language.

So your thoughts dictate the language that develops.

So going back to our New Guinean example,

a universalist would say that that group of people

and if they had concepts or ideas about other colors,

that thought determines language completely.

And now here, at this point, we have the idea

Just a little bit gentler of a statement.

And this is the idea that Piaget ascribed to.

Piaget came up with a theory of cognitive development

in children, and it was because of this and his observations

of children that he believed that once children

then they developed the language to describe those thoughts.

So, for example, when children learn that objects continue

to exist even though they can't see them,

So their language development is influenced

by their cognitive development and their newly-discovered

ability to understand that objects exist,

And now, a little further down, towards the more middle ground,

And Vygotsky thought that language and thought are

independent, but they converge through development.

So he didn't really say if language influenced thought

He just said they're both there, they're both independent,

but eventually, you learn to use them at the same time.

develop language through social interaction

with adults who already know the language.

learn to connect their thoughts and the language

OK, so now we're crossing over the middle ground

So these are called the weak and the strong hypotheses.

And this isn't a value judgment on how good they are

for us to think in certain ways depending

So, for example, I'm going to read you a sentence,

and I want you to draw it out or at least vividly imagine it.

OK, so however you drew that out or imagined it,

if you drew it this way, with the girl on the left pushing

the boy toward the right, than your native language probably

If you drew the girl pushing the boy this way,

with the girl on the right pushing toward the left,

one that reads from right to left, like Hebrew.

Now, it's not that you can't or didn't even draw it

It's just that, depending on how your language is structured,

for you to think about that action in a certain direction.

that language determines thought completely.

This is also called the Whorfian hypothesis,

because the guy that came up with it, his name was Whorf.

And he observed that there is a Native American tribe called

the Hopi that don't have any grammatical tense