Lateralized Whorf: Language influences perceptual decision in the right visual field (original) (raw)

Related papers

Further evidence that Whorfian effects are stronger in the right visual field than the left

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007

The Whorf hypothesis holds that differences between languages induce differences in perception and/or cognition in their speakers. Much of the experimental work pursuing this idea has focused on the domain of color and has centered on the issue of whether linguistically coded color categories influence color discrimination. A new perspective has been cast on the debate by recent results that suggest that language influences color discrimination strongly in the right visual field but not in the left visual field (LVF). This asymmetry is likely related to the contralateral projection of visual fields to cerebral hemispheres and the specialization of the left hemisphere for language. The current study presents three independent experiments that replicate and extend these earlier results by using different tasks and testing across different color category boundaries. Our results differ in one respect: although we find that Whorfian effects on color are stronger for stimuli in the right visual field than in the LVF, we find that there are significant category effects in the LVF as well. The origin of the significant category effect in the LVF is considered, and two factors that might account for the pattern of results are proposed.

Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2006

The question of whether language affects perception has been debated largely on the basis of cross-language data, without considering the functional organization of the brain. The nature of this neural organization predicts that, if language affects perception, it should do so more in the right visual field than in the left visual field, an idea unexamined in the debate. Here, we find support for this proposal in lateralized color discrimination tasks. Reaction times to targets in the right visual field were faster when the target and distractor colors had different names; in contrast, reaction times to targets in the left visual field were not affected by the names of the target and distractor colors. Moreover, this pattern was disrupted when participants performed a secondary task that engaged verbal working memory but not a task making comparable demands on spatial working memory. It appears that people view the right (but not the left) half of their visual world through the lens of their native language, providing an unexpected resolution to the language-and-thought debate.

The Whorfian mind The Whorfian mind Electrophysiological evidence that language shapes perception

Color perception has been a traditional test-case of the idea that the language we speak affects our perception of the world. 1 It is now established that categorical perception of color is verbally mediated and varies with culture and language. 2 However, it is unknown whether the well-demonstrated language effects on color discrimination really reach down to the level of visual perception, or whether they only reflect post-perceptual cognitive processes. Using brain potentials in a color oddball detection task with Greek and English speakers, we demonstrate that language effects may exist at a level that is literally perceptual, suggesting that speakers of different languages have differently structured minds. Categorical perception is a term used to describe people's tendency to perceive perceptual continua such as color as discon-tinuous discrete categories, resulting in finer discriminations across category boundaries than within category boundaries. 3,4 It is now widely accepted that categorical perception of color is constrained by language. Whether comparing populations from traditional remote cultures 5-7 or populations matched for technological sophistication and education, 8,9 the findings unequivocally show a discrimination advantage for cross-category over within-category stimuli consistent with the individual's linguistic partition of the color spectrum. This has been shown in both offline similarity judgment tasks 10 as well as in online perceptual matching tasks. 11 However, although these studies suggest that we perceive color categorically, it has been argued that the term Categorical 'Perception' is a misnomer as it is not clear whether response patterns reflect low-level perceptual processes rather than higher-level post-perceptual memory or language processes. 12-14 Thus we cannot dismiss the assumption of a set of universal color categories, which are hard-wired in the human visual system. 15-17 In Thierry, Athanasopoulos, Wiggett, Dering and Kuipers, 18 we measured brain potentials in Greek and English speakers to test the extent to which pre-attentive and unconscious aspects of perception are affected by an individual's native language. Greek differentiates between a light (ghalazio) and a dark (ble) shade of blue. 19 In two experimental blocks, all stimuli were light or dark blue and in the other two blocks the stimuli were light or dark green. We instructed participants to press a button when and only when they saw a square shape (target, probability 20%) within a regularly paced stream of circles (probability 80%). Within one block the most frequent stimulus was a light or dark circle (standard , probability 70%) and the remaining stimuli were circles of the same hue with a contrasting luminance (deviant, probability 10%), i.e., dark if the standard was light or vice versa. Crucially, in this study we analyzed brain wave patterns only for deviance in the color of the circles, not the shape of the stimulus, which was the focus of attention. We expected luminance deviants to elicit visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) in all blocks, indexing pre-attentive change detection, which requires no active response on the part of the participants. 20-22 The vMMN is elicited by deviant (rare) stimuli in visual oddball paradigms, independently of the direction of focused attention 22 and is therefore considered automatic and pre-attentive. 21,22 Consistent with our predictions, we found a vMMN effect of similar magnitude for blue and green contrasts in native speakers of English, but Greek participants perceived luminance deviants as more different in the blue than in the green blocks, which led to a greater vMMN effect for blues. We subsequently explored differences at earlier latencies, focusing on the so-called P1, that is, the first positive peak elicited by visual stimuli over parietooc-cipital regions of the scalp, to test for potential differences between participant groups in a time frame associated with activity in the primary and secondary visual cortices. 23 To our surprise, analysis of mean peak latencies and mean signal amplitudes between 100 and 130 ms revealed that the P1 peak followed a pattern of differences

Linguistic influences on visual memory

Memory & Cognition, 1975

The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis has raised considerable controversy in the literatures of psychology and anthropology. Several misconceptions of the hypothesis are reviewed, and the hypothesis was experimentally supported in a visual reproduction paradigm. Subjects were first given label training for a set of figures, and were then asked to recall by drawing the shapes. Training with categorized labels resulted in a 25% improvement in recall when compared to a condition with nonword (paralog) labels. Even stronger evidence of linguistic influence on visual memory was obtained by examining the order of recall. The conceptual relationships among labels strongly influenced the sequence of reproductions. Does language in any way influence the memory of visual stimuli? This question is directly related to the Whorf-Sapir (Whorfian) hypothesis which suggests that language is a powerful determinant of perception and thought. The hypothesis has never been clearly or singularly expressed, and so exists in several versions. A common distinction is made between "weak" and "strong" forms of the Whorfian hypothesis (Funkhouser, 1968; Slobin, 1971). The strong form, which holds that aspects of language can determine though t, is routinely rejected by experimental psychologists. The weak form suggests that "One is not fully a prisoner of one's language" but that language "can predispose people to think or act in one way rather than another" (Slobin, 1971, p. 122). Actually, the distinction is quite misleading, and probably stands as an excellent example of the Whorfian hypothesis in action. Psychology has, for the most part, adopted a probabilistic view of behavior; consequently, to say that language merely influences behavior is only to assert a scientific axiom. There is nothing necessarily "weak" about a variable which influences but does not strictly determine behavior, since influence is the strongest form of causality allowed to our science. It is interesting that labeling the hypothesis as "weak" seems to have led to a ready acceptance, but also a consequent devaluation of its importance, e.g., Slobin, 1971. While it is not reasonable for psychologists to distinguish the strong and weak forms of the Whorfian hypothesis, it is possible to consider the strength and extent of the linguistic influence. Investigations of linguistic influence on our sensory-perceptual experience are few and their findings are not compelling. Lenneberg (1967, p. 348) reports virtually no effect of different linguistic conventions on the ability to discriminate color hues. More promising support for the hypothesis Requests for reprints should be addressed to

A Whorfian speed bump? Effects of Chinese color names on recognition across hemispheres

Language Sciences, 2012

Recent research has provided impressive new evidence of linguistic (''Whorfian'') effects on cognition, much of it focused on categorical perception of colors, usually focusing on a single contrast (e.g., blue/green). This research has raised new questions about the location, timing, and robustness of such effects, some of which we addressed in two studies, one on color naming and one on color memory. In Experiment 1 we presented a wide array of colors in the right visual field (RVF) and left visual field (LVF), and found that easy-toname colors were named more quickly than hard-to-name colors in the RVF, but not the LVF. In Experiment 2 participants studied easy-to-name and hard-to-name colors carefully, then were tested on a recognition memory task. Accuracy did not differ across conditions, but easy-to-name colors took longer to recognize than hard-to-name colors, and recognition was faster in the LVF than the RVF for both easy-to-name and hard-to-name colors. The results suggest that: (1) linguistic effects on color discrimination cannot be restricted to the left hemisphere, as is often assumed; (2) faster implicit naming of colors (i.e., lexical accessibility) does not yield faster color recognition, but slower; and (3) varying effects on timing are most likely a byproduct of the relative specialization of color discrimination to the right hemisphere and of linguistic discrimination to the left hemisphere. Overall, these results suggest that linguistic effects on color cognition are more robust, distributed, and diverse than previously acknowledged. Implications of this research for the distributed, dynamical, and ecological nature of language, color, and cognition are explored.

The Whorfian mind: Electrophysiological evidence that language shapes perception

Color perception has been a traditional test-case of the idea that the language we speak affects our perception of the world. 1 It is now established that categorical perception of color is verbally mediated and varies with culture and language. 2 However, it is unknown whether the well-demonstrated language effects on color discrimination really reach down to the level of visual perception, or whether they only reflect post-perceptual cognitive processes. Using brain potentials in a color oddball detection task with Greek and English speakers, we demonstrate that language effects may exist at a level that is literally perceptual, suggesting that speakers of different languages have differently structured minds.

Evidence against Whorfian effects in motion conceptualisation

Journal of Pragmatics, 2010

This research tested the linguistic relativity theory in relation to the conceptual domain of manner of motion. Nineteen English and 19 Italian native speakers completed two tasks involving the use of 26 triads of video-clips showing motion events. The participants underwent first a non-linguistic trial consisting of a forced-choice similarity judgement task performed during speech shadowing. Subsequently, they were asked to verbally describe the same stimulus material used for their similarity judgements. Congruently with the findings of Cardini (2008), an analysis of the verbal descriptions showed that English speakers provided much more information about the manner in which some motion occurs than Italian speakers. However, in contrast to the significant difference found across the two linguistic groups in the verbal task, the scores regarding the non-linguistic performances were close to identical: when visually attending to the motion events displayed in the video-clips, English and Italian speakers exhibited the same differential attention for manner vs. path of motion. The results of this study provide evidence against Whorfian effects on non-linguistic cognition.