PSY1020 Foundation Psychology

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Discuss the ways in which language might affect perception of time, space, and colour.

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Discuss the ways in which language might affect perception of time, space, and colour.
‘Language is the magnificent faculty that we use to get thoughts from one head to another’

(Piker 2003). Humans have the ability to transmit ideas to one another using language, we are

able to create different sounds with our mouth that then travel to people’s eardrums and are

processed in the brain to create a thought. According to Lera Boroditsky (2018) there are

about 7000 languages in the world, and they all differ from one another, with different

sounds, vocabularies, grammar, and most importantly, structures. This raises the question

“does language affect thought?”; a debate that has been ongoing for many years and

producing a plethora of research. In this essay I will use this scholarship to determine the

extent to which language can have effects on the way humans perceive time, space, and

colour.

Space is an unbounded three-dimensional continuum that defines location. In English, left,

right, front, and back are words used to describe space. This is not the case for some

aboriginal Australian community who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, however. Instead, the members

of this community use cardinal directions – north, south, east, and west. One interesting

example is that to say ‘hello’ in Kuuk Thaayorre one would ask for the directions to which

another is heading, to which the recipient would reply based on their current cardinal

direction; something like “north-north east” (Boroditsky, 2011). Those who incorporate

spatial awareness in their language develop good orientation skills, even better than many

thought was humanly possible. This supports the idea that the language you speak can affect

your thought and thus shape your world. Pederson (1995) studied this by comparing a group

of Tamil speakers who use words like the English left and right to another group of Tamil

speakers that used cardinal directions, what he found is that they solve tasks that aren’t

language related in ways that conform to the language they speak. This is evident in the way

people who speak different languages think about time. For instance, if an English speaker

was asked to organise time they would do so from left to right, this is because of writing
direction. Thus, if a speaker of Arabic, for example, was asked to do the same they would do

it from right to left. The way time is thought about by people who speak these languages

changes when the body changes direction. The Kuuk Thaayorre, however, do not use such

words so they would organise time, again, by using cardinal directions with time going from

east to west. When they face south they organise time from left to right, when facing north

they do it from right to left, when facing east time comes towards the body. Therefore, the

way they think about time is based on the landscape (Boroditsky, 2011). This supports the

idea that language has an effect on people’s perception of space as people who speak

different languages think about space differently and use language to perform spatial tasks

which don’t have a linguistic basis (Zlatev & Blomberg, 2015).

There is also an important difference in the way time is encoded in different languages. In

some languages there is no distinction between the future and the present and this could lead

to the speakers of said language making more thoughtful decisions based on the

consequences of their actions. For example, in German people can talk about and make

predictions of the future using the present tense, while an English speaker would be required

to use a word to indicate the future like “will” or “is going to”. In this way, languages like

English require its speakers to make a distinction between present and future events, while

German does not. Could this linguistic difference have an effect on speakers’ intertemporal

choices? Separating the future from the present grammatically in one’s language can cause its

speakers to distance themselves from the future. This may lead them to make less decisions

that would benefit them in the future as it appears too far away, so they tend to opt for actions

that would give them immediate gratification. On the other hand, speakers of languages that

do not grammatically distinguish between the future and the present, like German, would be

more likely to make decisions that will provide them deferred gratification as the future

seems closer, therefore more valuable. According to M. Keith Chen (2013, p.1) speakers of
languages which have this attribute “save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice

safer sex, and are less obese”. This research suggests that language has some influence on the

way time is perceived; people who speak different languages view the future differently and

organise their life based on these views.

We have seen that language may have a consequences on peoples interpretation of space and

time which in turn influences their decisions in daily life, but language can also affect our

perception of basic, and somewhat less consequential, concepts such as colour. Colour is

what the eyes perceive as a consequence of light being reflected off of an object. Languages

vary in the ways that they express colour. The words we use for colour are categorical while

our perception of colour is a spectrum of shades, so we put varying colour combinations in

categories and separate it them based on a common identifier. There are differences in these

categories between languages, however. In some languages, like Vietnamese, there is a

colour for a mixture of green and blue (‘grue’) while in Russian there are different words for

light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy) (Wolff & Holmes, 2010). The question arises, do

people who speak different languages perceive colour differently as a result of these

linguistic variations? Scholarship suggests the concept of categorical perception, which

could be explained as the ability to identify different colours easier when they belong to

different categories. Therefore, by looking at a language’s categories a prediction of where

categorical perceptions occur can be made. For example, in studies where they observed

peoples brains while showing them colours changing gradually from light to dark blue, there

was a reaction in the brains of people who use different words for light and dark blue when

that change form light to dark took place. This is because they have a cognitive boundary

between those colours so when light blue becomes dark blue it is perceived as a categorical

change and they can identify this change more easily. However, this wouldn’t be the same

with an English speaker, for example, as nothing categorically changes from light to dark
blue (Winawer et al., 2007). Furthermore, research suggests that colour perception ceases to

exist when a simultaneous verbal task is performed, supporting the theory that colour

perception is based on language (Regier & Kay, 2009). Language might in fact affect

perception of colour, but studies by Gilbert et. al. suggest that it does so mostly, if not only,

in the right visual field. This is because the left hemisphere of the brain is responsible for

language and since the hemispheres of the brain control the opposite sides of the body, the

images from the right visual field are processed by the left hemisphere of the brain.

Ultimately, this suggests that half of our perceptual world might be viewed through the lens

of our native language, and half viewed without such a linguistic filter (Regier & Kay, 2009).

In conclusion, our perception of time, space, and colour can be influenced by the language we

speak, as it is so engrained in our brains that we even use it to solve non-linguistic tasks.

Research shows that people use concepts that obey the rules of the language they speak to

tackle spatial tasks through using different coordinate frames and words to think about space.

Language can also affect the human perception of time because of the grammatical

differences in the way we talk about the future. It only takes one word that marks future such

as “will” to be added or removed for the value we place on the future to change. These are

important concepts that shape our lives. Less important impacts of language can be observed

in way we view colour. Humans view colour as a continuum of shades and put boundaries

between them to separate it into colour categories. Languages differ in the way they do this,

meaning that people’s perception of colour differs from language to language. There is a

great variety of languages with innumerable differences from one another which means,

significantly, that there are multiple perceptions of the world and reality. Although language

might not shape reality as some argued it certainly influences humans perception of it.
 References

Boroditsky, L. (2018). How language shapes the way we think. Open Educational Resources

Collection. 13. https://irl.umsl.edu/oer/13

Boroditsky, L. (2011). How Languages Construct Time. Space, Time and Number in the

Brain, Chapter 20, 333–341. https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-385948-8.00020-7

Chen, M.K. (2013). The Effect of Language on Economic Behaviour: Evidence from Savings

Rate, Health Behaviours, and Retirement Assets. American Economic

Review, 103(2), 690-731. https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.103.2.690

Pinker, S. (2003). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. Penguin.

Regier, T., & Kay, P. (2009). Language, thought, and colour: Whorf was half right. Trends

in cognitive sciences,  13(10), 439–446. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2009.07.001

Wolff, P., & Holmes, K. J. (2010). Linguistic relativity. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews:

Cognitive Science, 2(3), 253–265. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.104

Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007).

Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the

National Academy of Sciences, 104(19), 7780–7785.

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Zlatev, J., & Blomberg, J. (2015). Language may indeed influence thought. Frontiers in

Psychology, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01631