Re: Linguistic relativitism beyond vMMNs and response times?
Posted: Thu May 06, 2010 3:33 pm
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.)
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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.)
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.)