How Language Shapes the Way We Think
COMPARING, DESCRIBING DIFFERENCES
whereas worse distinction differ
tell differentiate than in (2) at
instead across distinguishing different
as discriminate opposite in (1)
There are also really big differences __________ how people think about time.
So here I have pictures of my grandfather __________ different ages. And if I
ask an English speaker to organize time, they might lay it out this way, from left
to right. This has to do with writing direction. If you were a speaker of Hebrew or
Arabic, you might do it going in the __________ direction, from right to left.
[It’s] very egocentric of me to have the direction of time chase me around every
time I turn my body. For the Kuuk Thaayorre, time is locked on the landscape.
It's a dramatically __________ way of thinking about time.
***
Lots of languages have grammatical gender; every noun gets assigned a
gender. And these genders differ __________ languages.
***
So, two people witness the same crime, but end up remembering different things
about that crime. This has implications, of course, for eyewitness testimony. It
also has implications for blame and punishment. So if you take English speakers
and I just show you someone breaking a vase, and I say, "He broke the vase,"
__________ opposed to "The vase broke," you will punish someone more, you
will blame someone more.
***
Languages also __________ in how they divide up the color spectrum -- the
visual world. Some languages have lots of words for colors, some have only a
couple words, "light" and "dark." And languages differ __________ where they
put boundaries between colors. So, for example, in English, there's a word for
blue that covers all of the colors that you can see on the screen, but in Russian,
there isn't a single word. __________, Russian speakers have to __________
between light blue, "goluboy," and dark blue, "siniy." So Russians have this
lifetime of experience of, in language, __________ these two colors. When we
test people's ability to perceptually __________ these colors, what we find is
that Russian speakers are faster across this linguistic boundary. They're faster
to be able to __________ the difference between a light and dark blue. And
when you look at people's brains as they're looking at colors -- say you have
colors shifting slowly from light to dark blue -- the brains of people who use
different words for light and dark blue will give a surprised reaction as the colors
shift from light to dark, as if, "Ooh, something has categorically changed,"
__________ the brains of English speakers, for example, that don't make this
categorical __________, don't give that surprise, because nothing is
categorically changing.
***
They stay oriented better __________ we used to think humans could. We used
to think that humans were __________ than other creatures because of some
biological excuse.
