Linguistic relativitism beyond vMMNs and response times?

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TomHChappell
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Re: Linguistic relativitism beyond vMMNs and response times?

Post by TomHChappell »

What are vMMNs? I've multisearched and can't find them related to linguistic relativism at all.
When I search for
"Linguistic relativism" "response times"
and then open the results retrieved and search them for vMMN or even just MMN, I find nothing.
http://www.psychology.pl/download/key_s ... hought.pdf doesn't contain that character-string, for instance.
Is there some phrase it's an acronym for that everyone else on the thread so far just assumes everyone knows?

"Visual Mismatch Negativity" is abbreviated "vMMN" in many of these results; but only two have anything to do with language at all, and neither of them is about linguistic relativism:
http://the-mouse-trap.blogspot.com/2009 ... cious.html
and
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1172.

At least the first one of those two does relate to the question "does language have an effect on perception?"; but it doesn't mention any word containing the character-string "relativ".

So I'm not sure the vMMNs the OP wanted to go beyond are the "Visual Mismatch Negativities" talked about in those and the other articles.

(This search turned up some articles that mention both vMMN and "response time", but I'm not sure how many were relevant.)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Anyway:

The saying is that anything that can be said in one natlang one could also be said in any other natlang. How much research has been done to confirm or deny that?

If that's the case, though, I would expect that all language-caused differences in thought would be small. They would be on the relative ease or difficulty of thinking the thought clearly; and on which consequences of it would seem obvious and which would occur to one only after measurably more effort. They wouldn't be on which thoughts can be thought or which lines of reasoning could be followed and correctly criticized as valid or invalid.

So, though the influence of language upon thought could, FAIK, be still there even in "macroscopic things", I would expect -- if the above saying is indeed true -- that even those effects would usually be so minor as to be not very noticeable, or at least not more noticeable than the "vMMNs and response times".

(But, if the above saying is not true, then I don't have a guess.)

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Post by Salmoneus »

Torco wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:
Torco wrote: Caveat: I think sex-based gender doesn't count at all... sex is, paraphrasing Manuel Castells IIRC, the prime term in a human's identity; before anything, you are your sex; it influences the way people treat you before you even take your first breath.
Bollocks. If I were female, my life would be in all significant ways (barring some minor differences when going to the toilet and so on) exactly the same. And maybe I'd think more about having children and at a younger age, but that's not really relevant at my age (and will stop being relevant later on as well). Other than those points, the few slight differences are culturally imposed and culturally specific.
[emphasis mine]

You miss the point, man. check the bolding.
Not really. Firstly, your bolded part is no truer of gender than of height, weight, colour, age, musculature or so forth (probably less so than some of those). Secondly, this has nothing to do with being "the prime term in a human's identity," which is a ridiculous claim for which you offer no evidence whatsoever beyond the fact that other people will often notice your gender.
Oh, and wasn't your sister like able to beat your teeth in? I mean, okay, but that's certainly not the standard.
Well, she's a fair bit older than me, and otherwise fairly similar in build physically (other than the obvious), and was always more sporty than me. I don't know about beating my teeth in, but when we were children, even into university, she would win in any fights we had. But all three factors there are very commonplace - there's nothing non-standard or unusual about book-reading boys and rugby-playing girls.
'Sides my whole argument was based on cultural differences. Thing is, people, especially in less-gender-equal cultures, will most of the time consider if their interlocutor or some other people is girl or boy anyway.
Again, this is true, but irrelevant. They will categorise their interlocutors in many dimensions on the basis of their physical characteristics; some of those dimensions have significant social consequences. In some cultures, gender (more so than sex) is a culturally significant category. But there are plenty of other categories equally if not more important. There is certainly no reason, on this basis, to elevate sex to being the "prime term of identity" in any culture, let alone all, let alone ours.
You seem to be arguing against one small idea within my larger point.
You seem to be arguing for one small idea (people are able to recognise breasts) within the larger point (sex (and not even gender) is the first and most important element in the way people consider themselves).
Besides, Bollocks-Back, if you were female, your life would NOT be the same. hands down.
In what way would it differ? I'd be a bit more likely to get raped walking alone after dark; I'd be a bit less likely to get in fights on streets or in pubs. Socially prescribed mating rituals would be different, but as I'm introverted and socially inept anyway (and tend to associate with somewhat non-mainstream people), this wouldn't be a particularly important difference. Later on in my life, for a short period, I'd probably think more about having children, and the thoughts would be different. I might earn a slightly lower salary across the course of my life, but not enought to severely impact my lifestyle, and although I might experience prejudice against me in some jobs, I probably wouldn't be going in for those careers anyway.

Obviously, it is impossible to change ANYTHING about a person and still have 'the same person', living the 'same life', as even tiny changes might expand into dramatic differences through sheer chaos. But accepting that conceit, then ceteris paribus, no, my life would not (likely) be massively different if I had different genitals.
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Post by Torco »

I dunno, man, maybe she'd be the socially inept and you'd be the large one if you'd been the girl, ceteris paribus, but hey, it might not be, if you say so... I don't know your sister [or you that well, for that matter], besides, there's plenty of research that suggests gender and sex influence stuff like how your brain works, tho' neuroscience isn't all that advanced yet. Anyway I'm just shooting for tendencies, not trying to establish ideal relations of necessity, so yeah. I mean that I think gender is probably going to be prominent in almost every culture, and it indeed is, AFAIK, on most. Whether something is edible, or certain dimensions of TAM, or definiteness, OTOH, might not necessarily be as prominent, and so might be ground for the phenomenon that I posit [grammatical marking promoting a concept's prominence] to occur.

I'm not saying nothing's the the first and most important element in the way no one nothings, I'm saying gender [and sex] is a big deal (no matter what some feminists might want to think), that bigdealness has a pretty big biological basis, and that therefore it's special amongst grammatical categories regarding a very particular interpretation of, or maybe proposed mechanism for, the S-W hypotheses.

(I find those differences between reality and reality-with-a-female-you rather significant, tho')

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