Re: [xmca] Language May Help Create, Not Just Convey, Thoughts and Feelings

[Robert Lake <boblake@georgiasouthern.edu>]

Serpel and Joseph,

I appreciate your dialogue on this.

Have you read Jesperson's thought on this.

*Men sang out their feelings long before they were able to speak their
thoughts. But of course we must not imagine that "singing" means exactly the
same thing here as in a modern concert hall. When we say that speech
originated in song, what we mean is merely that our comparatively monotonous
spoken language and our highly developed vocal music are differentiations of
primitive utterances, which had more in them of the latter than of the
former. These utterances were at first, like the singing of birds and the
roaring of many animals and the crying and crooning of babies, exclamative,
not communicative -- that is, they came forth from an inner craving of the
individual… *

*       They little suspected that in singing as nature prompted them they
were paving the way for a language capable of rendering minute shades of
thought; just as they could not suspect that out of their coarse pictures of
men and animals there should one day grow an art enabling men of distant
countries to speak to one another.*

*   * 0. Jesperson, *Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin*( London:
Allen & Unwin,1922), pp.436-437.


On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 12:04 AM, Joseph Gilbert <joeg4us@roadrunner.com>wrote:

> Serpel;
> I suggest you explore your own emotional/somatic reactions to the vocal
> sounds of whatever language you wish. If you do not feel any reaction, then
> look for what emotional states the sounds suggest? Spoken language is
> founded upon sounds of the body, sounds that convey states of the body's
> emotions. The use of these sounds as words, to refer to things, is based
> upon their being expressive emotionally. Scientists have been distracted by
> the referential function of spoken language and have neglected to study the
> primal function of vocal body language, the conveyance of what's going on
> with the moment-by-moment emotional process.
>
>                Joseph Gilbert
>
>
>
> On Nov 19, 2010, at 10:18 AM, Serpil S Sonmez wrote:
>
>  I thought this is a very timely article after
>> Vygotsky/Sapir/Whorf/Saussure discussions.
>> Best,
>>
>> Serpil S. Fox
>>
>> http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/11/101103111206.htm
>>
>> The paper appears in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
>> "Charlemagne is reputed to have said that to speak another language is to
>> possess another soul," says co-author Oludamini Ogunnaike, a graduate
>> student at Harvard. "This study suggests that language is much more than a
>> medium for expressing thoughts and feelings. Our work hints that language
>> creates and shapes our thoughts and feelings as well."
>>
>> Implicit attitudes, positive or negative associations people may be
>> unaware they possess, have been shown to predict behavior towards members of
>> social groups. Recent research has shown that these attitudes are quite
>> malleable, susceptible to factors such as the weather, popular culture --
>> or, now, by the language people speak.
>>
>> "Can we shift something as fundamental as what we like and dislike by
>> changing the language in which our preferences are elicited?" asks co-author
>> Mahzarin R. Banaji, the Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics at
>> Harvard. "If the answer is yes, that gives more support to the idea that
>> language is an important shaper of attitudes."
>>
>> Ogunnaike, Banaji, and Yarrow Dunham, now at the University of California,
>> Merced, used the well-known Implicit Association Test (IAT), where
>> participants rapidly categorize words that flash on a computer screen or are
>> played through headphones. The test gives participants only a fraction of a
>> second to categorize words, not enough to think about their answers.
>> "The IAT bypasses a large part of conscious cognition and taps into
>> something we're not aware of and can't easily control," Banaji says.
>>
>> The researchers administered the IAT in two different settings: once in
>> Morocco, with bilinguals in Arabic and French, and again in the U.S. with
>> Latinos who speak both English and Spanish.
>> In Morocco, participants who took the IAT in Arabic showed greater
>> preference for other Moroccans. When they took the test in French, that
>> difference disappeared. Similarly, in the U.S., participants who took the
>> test in Spanish showed a greater preference for other Hispanics. But again,
>> in English, that preference disappeared.
>>
>> "It was quite shocking to see that a person could take the same test,
>> within a brief period of time, and show such different results," Ogunnaike
>> says. "It's like asking your friend if he likes ice cream in English, and
>> then turning around and asking him again in French and getting a different
>> answer."
>>
>> In the Moroccan test, participants saw "Moroccan" names (such as Hassan or
>> Fatimah) or "French" names (such as Jean or Marie) flash on a monitor, along
>> with words that are "good" (such as happy or nice) or "bad" (such as hate or
>> mean). Participants might press one key when they see a Moroccan name or a
>> good word, and press another when they see a French name or a bad word. Then
>> the key assignments are switched so that "Moroccan" and "bad" share the same
>> key and "French" and "good" share the other.
>>
>> Linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf first posited in the 1930s that language is so
>> powerful that it can determine thought. Mainstream psychology has taken the
>> more skeptical view that while language may affect thought processes, it
>> doesn't influence thought itself. This new study suggests that Whorf's idea,
>> when not caricatured, may generate interesting hypotheses that researchers
>> can continue to test.
>>
>> "These results challenge our views of attitudes as stable," Banaji says.
>> "There still remain big questions about just how fixed or flexible they are,
>> and language may provide a window through which we will learn about their
>> nature."
>>
>> Ogunnaike, Dunham, and Banaji's work was supported by Harvard's
>> Weatherhead Center for International Affairs and the Mellon Mays Foundation.
>>
>> ]
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-- 
*Robert Lake  Ed.D.
*Assistant Professor
Social Foundations of Education
Dept. of Curriculum, Foundations, and Reading
Georgia Southern University
P. O. Box 8144
Phone: (912) 478-5125
Fax: (912) 478-5382
Statesboro, GA  30460

 *Democracy must be born anew in every generation, and education is its
midwife.*
*-*John Dewey.
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