Whorf Hypothesis

For example, in Western culture, saying someone has an “artistic personality” implies that the person is creative, intense, and temperamental and has an unconventional lifestyle. The Chinese, however, do not have a schema or implicit personality theory for an artistic type.
Canonical Approach
42
Noncanonical Approach
42 Or … …
One-to-one Collection
42
Number Terms
• The results indicated that Japanese children were more than twice as likely as U.S. children tended to use canonical approaches on the first trial. The U.S. children tended to use one-to-one collections on the first trial. When prodded to generates a second trial. Miura also found that Japanese children used more noncanonical approaches than U.S. children. The similar results have been found using Korean and Chinese first-graders.
If people were using their cultural theories to understand the stories they read, what would be expected to happen? One measure of the use of theories (or schemas) is the tendency to fill in the blanks – to believe that information fitting the schema was observed when in fact it was not. The researchers asked the participants to write down their impressions of the characters in the stories; they then looked to see whether the participants listed traits that were not in the stories but did fit the artistic or shi gu(世故) personality type.
• In English, the system of naming numbers is relatively complex. The names for numbers 11 and 12, for instance, are unrelated to the names for 1 and 2. The names for 13 through 19 consist of the unit name before the decade name (for example, seventeen). Furthermore, the names for numbers between 20 and 99 consist of the decade name followed by the unit name (for example, thirty-three).
Whorf Hypothesis
• Do you believe that someone who is kind is generous as well?
Implicit Personality Theory
• Implicit personality theory is a type of schema people use to group various kinds of personality traits together. Implicit personality theories differ from culture to culture.
Hoffman and his colleagues (1986) hypothesized that these cultural implicit personality theories influence the way people form impressions of others. To test this hypothesis, they wrote stories in English and Chinese, describing someone behaving like an artistic type or a shi gu(世故) type, without using those labels. They gave the English versions to a group of native English speakers who speak no other language and to a group of Chinese-English bilinguals. Another group of Chinese-English bilinguals received the versions written in Chinese.
Number Terms
• Miura (1987) studied first-grade children from the United States and Japan. The children were shown how to use a set of blocks to represent numbers. The set consisted of white unit blocks and purple tens blocks equivalent to 10 unit blocks stuck together.
Number Terms
• In contrast, Asian languages such as Chinese are more regular. The names for numbers between 11 and 99 consist of the decade name followed by the unit name. for instance, the Chinese word for 18 is ten eight(十八) and the word for 35 is three ten five(三十五). For numbers less than 10 and greater than 99, English and Chinese naming systems are more similar.
Conversely, in China, there are categories of personality that do not exist in Western culture. For example, a shi gu(世故) person is someone who is worldly, devoted to his or her family, socially skillful, and somewhat reserved.
Number Terms
• Miura distinguished three approaches to the task. A canonical approach was one that placed on no more than nine unit blocks in the one’s position. A noncanonical approach was one that used some combination of tens blocks and more than nine unit blocks. A one-to-one collection used only unit blocks. • 42
These results are consistent with the Whorf Hypothesis.
Benjamin Whorf Benjamin Lee Whorf Born Died Nationality Fields Alma mater Known for April 24, 1897 Winthrop, Massachusetts July 26, 1941(1941-07-26) (aged 44) American linguistics Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
Number Terms
1
First trial
Thirty-five
35
U.S. children read 三十五 Japanese children
5 minutes Second trial
26
Be reminded of the equivalence of 10 unit blocks and 1 tens block and then asked to show each number in another way
Whorf Hypothesis
• The Whorf Hypothesis states that the way we think about the world is shaped by our language.
Whorf Hypothesis
• The linguistic determinism hypothesis can be interpreted in at least two different ways. • The strong version states that language determines cognition: the presence of linguistic categories creates cognitive categories. • A weak version of the hypothesis states that the presence of linguistic categories influences the ease with which various cognitive operations are performed. Certain thought processes may be more accessible or more easily performed by members of one linguistic community relative to those of a different linguistic community. • In any event, no evidence exists for the strong version. However, the weak version may be tenable.
• Experimental tests of the Whorf Hypothesis fall into two groups: those that examine the lexical level avel.
Number Terms