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> 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.
Yes, that's exactly what I said -- Lera proved that questions addressed
in the listener's representational system are more quickly understood.
You chose to ignore my point that the differences between the two groups
would have been even more pronounced if you had divided two groups based
on vertical vs. horizontal representation systems rather than childhood
language. I'm not arguing that the results are false, but that such
correlations are easy to find and they exist apart from linguistic
boundaries, and they are not nearly as significant or meaningful as
people think.
Childhood language may be correlated with certain internal
representational system choices, but it's not deterministic, and the
results of such experiments are little more than parlor tricks. It
would be equally easy to deduce a set of terms that had different
affinity between men and women (and in fact, I have participated in one
such experiment). Then the researcher could separate men from women
without having to see or hear them, simply by noting response times to
particular questions. The same could be done to separate Jew and Moslem
by using particular metaphors peculiar to each culture. Again, parlor
tricks. The question is, what's the significance? Many languages do
not have as many words to classify relatives (aunt, great-uncle, etc.)
as English does. You could easily concoct an experiment that
highlighted these differences. But does it "prove" that these people
have trouble thinking beyond the extended family? Maybe it proves that
they are more intimately aware of family connections ("my brother's
wife's mother" is more descriptive than "brother's mother-in-law" or
"sister-in-law's mom"). If I were a huckster or racist, I could "prove"
nearly any thesis with these facts.
This stuff is conducted with the same scientific and logical rigor as
phrenology, and is the worst kind of deceit because it is used so often
by facists to cloak their wild theses in a mantle of scientific purity.
Again, I welcome people to read the papers available and come to their
own conclusions, and would warn that if they find themselves attaching
anything beyond "parlor trick" mentality to the Sapir-Whorf crowd,
please stay away from anything requiring crisp thinking :-)
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