For an English speaker, I expect that a picture of a rose will increase (albeit minimally) their speed/accuracy in a tachistoscopic word-recognition test when given the word “columns.”
For a Chinese speaker, I don’t expect the same effect for the Chinese translation of “columns.”
I expect this difference because priming effects on speed/accuracy of tachistoscopic word-recognition tasks based on lexical associations are well-documented, and because for an English-speaker, the picture of a rose is associated with the word “rose,” which is associated with the word “rows,” which is associated with the word “columns,” and because I know of no equivalent association-chain for a Chinese-speaker.
Of course, how long it takes to identify “columns” (or its translation) as a word isn’t the kind of thing people usually care about when they talk about differences in thought. It’s a trivial example, agreed.
I mention it not because I think it’s hugely important, but because it is concrete. That is, it is a demonstrable difference in the implicit associations among thoughts that can’t easily be attributed to some vague channeling of the influences of unspecified and unmeasurable differences between their cultures.
Sure, it’s possible to come up with such an explanation after the fact, but I’d be pretty skeptical of that sort of “explanation”. It’s far more likely due to the differences between languages that caused me to predict it in the first place.
One could reply that, sure, differences in languages can create trivial influences in associations among thoughts, but not significant ones, and it’s “just obvious” that significant influences are what this whole Sapir-Whorf discussion is about.
For an English speaker, I expect that a picture of a rose will increase (albeit minimally) their speed/accuracy in a tachistoscopic word-recognition test when given the word “columns.”
For a Chinese speaker, I don’t expect the same effect for the Chinese translation of “columns.”
I expect this difference because priming effects on speed/accuracy of tachistoscopic word-recognition tasks based on lexical associations are well-documented, and because for an English-speaker, the picture of a rose is associated with the word “rose,” which is associated with the word “rows,” which is associated with the word “columns,” and because I know of no equivalent association-chain for a Chinese-speaker.
Of course, how long it takes to identify “columns” (or its translation) as a word isn’t the kind of thing people usually care about when they talk about differences in thought. It’s a trivial example, agreed.
I mention it not because I think it’s hugely important, but because it is concrete. That is, it is a demonstrable difference in the implicit associations among thoughts that can’t easily be attributed to some vague channeling of the influences of unspecified and unmeasurable differences between their cultures.
Sure, it’s possible to come up with such an explanation after the fact, but I’d be pretty skeptical of that sort of “explanation”. It’s far more likely due to the differences between languages that caused me to predict it in the first place.
One could reply that, sure, differences in languages can create trivial influences in associations among thoughts, but not significant ones, and it’s “just obvious” that significant influences are what this whole Sapir-Whorf discussion is about.
I would accept that.