The relationship between the reality we perceive and language seems, more and more, to be a two-way link. The idea that reality affects our language is obvious, but the fact that our language affects how we perceive reality less so. Therefore, many researchers are working on ways to test the existence of this relationship to better understand it.
This search for the link has left us certainly curious investigationswhich tell us a lot about how we understand abstract concepts Like the time. Daniel Cassanto is one of the researchers trying to investigate these issues.
According to the investigations of Cassanto and colleagues like Lera Boroditsky, some of them collected by Miriam Frankel and Matt Warren in an article for BBC Future, it is possible to observe how different cultures seem to represent time in a specific axis and direction. These representations are correlated with language variables.
For example, when people who speak languages that write from left to right are asked to represent time, such as Spanish, English, etc. time will be “written” in the same wayas a line that advances from the left (past) to the right (future).
Boroditsky verified through various experiments how, while this was true for English speakers, it was not true for Mandarin speakers. Mandarin, like Japanese, is usually written from top to bottom. According to the experiments, this was also the way their speakers represented time, with the past on top and the future on the bottom. The bilingual participants had an easier time managing in both cases.
Boroditsky ran another set of experiments, this time comparing English speakers with Hebrew speakers. The Hebrew, like Arabic, is written from right to left. The result also indicated that English speakers tended to view time as a line moving from left to right while the opposite was true for Hebrew speakers.
Counting time depends on everything
There is yet another dimension in which we can represent time: forward or backward. For whoever is reading this article, the reference will surely be obvious: back in time is the past; forward in time, the future. But there are languages in which the relationship is the opposite.
The logic here is that we can visualize the past, as what we have in front of us; but we cannot know what the future holds for us, as if it were behind our backs. Although the link is clear, this example could indicate rather in the opposite causal direction, that is, perception modulating our language.
What if we forget time as a single dimension? In another article, Cassanto and Boroditsky discussed how the view of time as a line could not always be taken for granted either. Thus, in Greek, an interval of time will be, not short or long, but large or small. The Spanish here would be in an intermediate place: someone can take a short break or can talk about the fact that their weekend has become very short.
These questions seem trivial, but they are far from it. So far we have explored some of the directions that time can take in our imagination. One was missing, the representation of time from the bottom up. This representation is common in physics, for example in light coneswhich represent a three-dimensional space with two dimensions of space and one, vertical, of time.
Modern physics has reached levels of complexity that make some interpretations quite a mental effort. For example, the idea that time can flow at two different speeds at different points in space, or even freeze inside a black hole.
Are there people more qualified to visualize these realities? Do the languages we know matter? These are more than relevant questions when drawing interpretations at the frontiers of knowledge in these fields.
But there may also be more practical implications. For example in the economy. Within this discipline, saving is a key factorcan it be linked to the language? According to the analysis of Keith Chen, a behavioral economist, a specialty of economics closely linked to psychology, the answer is yes.
According to his analysis, the key would be in how languages speak of the future. Spanish, similar to English, but not identical, conjugates verbs to build future forms. Not all languages do this. According to Chen, having verb forms associated with the future “separates” it in our imagination, which would make it more difficult to think in the long term. The macroeconomic data seems to support his idea, but the immense number of variables to consider in economic development makes it difficult to confirm this.
Who broke the vase?
This is not the only case in which the evidence in favor of this relationship is promising but insufficient to generate a scientific consensus. An example comes from another work by Boroditsky.
Here the question was not in how we represent time but in how we remember events. In Spanish, as in Japanese, a vase can break. In English, however, this would imply that the vase broke itself. Which doesn’t make much sense.
According to Boroditsky’s experiments, English speakers were better able to remember who had broken the vase. The difference between the ability to recall the event, while significant, was not large (most participants were able to recall the event).
Memory is another matter that plays a fundamental role for Nola Klemfuss. In an article published in the magazine Frontiers in Psychology, warned against drawing hasty conclusions from experiments. According to his alternative hypothesis, memory could be behind what experts interpret as perception of reality.
The reason is that many of the experiments narrated so far are based on the participants’ ability to perform tasks (such as ordering images chronologically or remembering who broke a vase). These are activities in which memory plays a role, sometimes important, sometimes fundamental. That memory processes work “coordinated” with our language could help participants to perform tasks better.
The role of memory is not foreign to Casasanto, who explains in the BBC article “we know that people remember the things they pay the most attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to a variety of different things, whether it be gender, movement, or color.”
But the debate is still open. Experts such as Noam Chomsky or Steven Pinker have traditionally been against these hypotheses, sometimes grouped under the term Whorfians as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Criticism assumes that the relationship between language and perception of reality is unidirectional.
Critics like Mark Liberman, who in a debate with Boroditsky in 2010 explained his position. In their common interpretation, they view a list of dictionary entries as determining the set of available thoughts, this proposition is false. What’s more, this false interpretation attracts other falsehoods and exaggerations.”
Boroditsky, for his part, explained that “language shapes our thinking in the same way that studying in medical school or learning to fly an airplane creates an experience and transforms what we can do. Different languages foster different forms of cognitive experience.
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