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Joshua Allen scripsit:
> > examples -- there are some contemporary cogitive researchers,
> > including one at MIT, who are presently reinvigorating debate about
>
> Chomsky was MIT as well.
And still is. Your point is?
> As long as there are people who wish to
> identify their race, culture, or political bias as being "superior" in
> order to justify neo-eugenics or genocide, you'll have interest in this
> brand of pseudo-science. The existence of contemporary interest does
> not make a bad idea better.
The fact that the world's biggest fool says it's raining is no evidence
that the sun is shining.
> The researcher you point to should illustrate the general pattern of
> these arguments. The example in "mandarin speakers vs. English speakers
> (2001)" is truly pathetic. As far as I can tell, the research simply
> proves that you are more effective in communicating when you communicate
> in the listener's preferred representational system (or context as Simon
> puts it).
Then you badly misunderstood the article. When sinophone and anglophone
native speakers were compared *on an English-language test*, the former
were quicker to respond to "Is X earlier than Y?" if they had been primed
with questions like "Is X above Y?" than if the priming question was
"Is X before Y (spatially)?", whereas anglophone native speakers were
the other way about.
The effect was stronger for those who had learned English later, and
non-Mandarin speakers who had been trained on novel English sentences
like "Tuesday is above Wednesday" showed the same pattern of response
as the Mandarin natives. (I have burked many details here.)
> As another example, Mandarin Chinese uses numerical names for some things
> that English speakers use symbolic names for (example month names). It
> is patently obvious that someone asked "quick, which comes first,
> three-month or five-month" would respond more quickly than someone asked
> "which is higher, march or may?"
That would be fine, except that questions of thes types were not used,
since the testing (as opposed to the training of the special anglophone
group) was entirely in fully idiomatic English.
--
We call nothing profound jcowan@reutershealth.com
that is not wittily expressed. John Cowan
--Northrop Frye (improved) http://www.reutershealth.com
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