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Joshua Allen wrote:
>>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 :-)
So anyone who accepts, in part, that language may influence thought is
lending support to hucksters, racists and fascists? I think I will take
your advice and stay away from that sort of "crisp thinking". ;-}
Bob Foster
http://xmlbuddy.com/
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