'You Say Up, I Say Yesterday'

According to Lera Boroditsky’s research of language’s impact of cognition. How language can affect thought. She discusses how space, navigation, time, and color can be perceived differently based on the language you speak. Different people who speak different languages focus more on the concept that their language can best describe, such as the different hues of blue. “Russian speakers could distinguish between hues of blue faster if they were called by different names in Russian. English speakers showed no increased sensitivity for the same colors.” 

“Slobin coined the term "thinking for speaking" to describe how the language-specific ways different cultures talk about space and time shape how they think about space and time”. “About a third of the world's languages do not rely on words for right and left. Instead, their speakers use what are called absolute directions—north, south, east and west”. Another dimension, time, also affected cognition as “In the Yagua language of Peru, there are five distinct grammatical forms of the past tense” whereas Indonesian only has one tense to describe all times. So when shown pictures of different motions of an action, the Indonesians described all images as the same as they perceive this time passing during the motion as the same. This is a "psychologically active perceptual boundary.” Where one speaker perceives certain details differently than speakers from a different language. 

This concept of Neo-Whorfianism aligns with the text “Horton Heared a Who” by Steven Pinker as both discuss the relationship between cognition and language. Pinker observes how the human mind plays a role in the English language nowadays, as the child instinctively obtains the main aspects of aspects and understanding of something. This supports Boroditsky’s hypothesis that the language impacts a person’s cognition as a child not only picks up the grammatical structures but also the dimensions such as time, direction, color, etc. Based on the mother language thought the child will (based on Boroditsky’s theory) instinctively focus more on certain aspects which can be described in that particular language (for example the different hues of Blue in Russian). Thus change the understanding of certain situations and concepts based on the thought mother language.


source: Hamilton, Joan O'C., and Northeastern University. "You Say Up, I Say Yesterday" Exploring Language. By Gary Goshgarian. Fourteenth ed. Vol. 487. Boston: Pearson, n.d. 463-68. Exploring Language.