I seem to be completely confused …
We are well aware of the principle formulated by Karl Marx: "Being determines consciousness." Let's not go into how true this is. But consciousness, as scientists have found, is influenced by other factors, in particular - language. Moreover, even before a person actually starts talking, complaining about “my being” and complaining that “the language will bring it to Kiev” … And Kiev has already been brought to the handle!
But in this case we are not talking about that. It is known that language only reflects the peculiarities of our vision, our thoughts and feelings. But can language itself influence our thinking?
Back in 1991, an article was published in the Cognition magazine, which said that Koreans, compared to the British, pay more attention to how objects connect to each other, how well they fit together.
In 1997, in the same Cognition, a similar work appeared, but this time about the Japanese - they, as it turned out, prefer to group objects according to the material from which they are made, while English takes the form in the first place.
In 2007, an article was published in PNAS magazine, which stated that Russian-speaking people are quicker to distinguish shades of blue than English-speaking ones. Finally, a year ago we wrote about experiments with bilingual people who speak English and German: it turned out that their perception of the world partly changes, and it changes precisely under the influence of the second language - a different syntax makes you look at what is happening differently.
The question arises at what age the influence of language on thinking first appears. And, it would seem, the answer suggests itself that this happens in childhood, when the child learns to speak.
Researchers from Northwestern University agree with this point of view, but with one caveat - according to their data, language begins to influence consciousness even before a person utters his first word.
Promotional video:
Nine-month-old children who still could not speak were shown brightly colored creatures that, appearing randomly in the middle of the screen, scattered either to the left or right, and then disappeared. The essence of the experiment was that the "population" of creatures was denoted either in one word or in two words, and in the latter case, one word was meant for those who move in one direction, and the other for those who move in the other direction. These words were heard by children observing the creatures.
Then it was the turn of the second part of the experiment: the multi-colored creatures again appeared in the center of the screen, and psychologists carefully watched with the help of special equipment, where the children would look. In the direction of the child's gaze, one could understand what he expects from the creature - that it will move to the left or to the right. The point here was to understand whether there was a connection between the verbal categories denoting "right" creatures and "left" creatures, and thinking. The connection did appear: those children who learned the two categories were quite good at predicting the movement of the figures; but those who heard only one common name for all, could not predict the direction of movement.
It follows from this that even in the process of initial mastering of a language and even before a person learns to speak himself, language categories affect our perception, and the ability to work and analyze what we were able to perceive.
Perhaps, in the future, the initial such linguistic effect changes under the influence of new "data", both linguistic and non-linguistic, but in itself such an early interaction of consciousness and external speech is very remarkable. Obviously, the new results should attract the attention of neuroscientists and educators dealing with the problems of thinking development.