In yesterday's Relatively Speaking post I talked about some research that seemed to offer evidence in support of the theory of linguistic relativity. As part of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, this theory makes the assumption that language and thought are inextricably linked and that one cannot exist (in the form that we know it) without the other. The evidence from the study pointed towards the conclusion that language and thought cannot be separated.
Simple enough? Apparently not. An article appearing yesterday on the Wired Science blog network reports on the findings of a recent language study carried out by psychologist Susan Goldwin-Meadow. The study focuses on the translation of simple sentences into hand gestures and observes that speakers of SVO language (those whose sentences follow the order of subject-verb-object - e.g. Bill eats cake) almost universally switch the order to subject-object-verb when communicating with their hands only. So in the example I've just given, someone communicating by gesture would probably point at Bill, then point at cake, then mimic the action of eating. Goldwin-Meadow claims that this suggests "the independence of language from thought". What she's saying is that the structure of language cannot be an immediate product of our thought processes because our gestures almost always fall back on a different structure. This, of course, completely contradicts the conclusions of the study I was discussing in yesterday's blog - but it does support some of the key theories of language acquisition that we're going to be exploring for Unit 6 (ENA6) of the A2 course and in Unit 1 (ENGA1) of the new AS level course. Have a look at the article and see what you think.
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