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Language and Perception
To this point in the chapter we have considered intelligence and language as if they are separate
concepts. But what if language influences our thinking? The idea that language and its
structures influence and limit human thought is called linguistic relativity.
The most frequently cited example of this possibility was proposed by Benjamin Whorf (1897–
1941), an American linguist who was particularly interested in Native American languages.
Whorf argued that the Inuit people of Canada (sometimes known as Eskimos) had many words
for snow, whereas English speakers have only one, and that this difference influenced how the
different cultures perceived snow. Whorf argued that the Inuit perceived and categorized snow in
finer details than English speakers possibly could, because the English language constrained
perception.
Although the idea of linguistic relativism seemed reasonable, research has suggested that
language has less influence on thinking than might be expected. For one, in terms of perceptions
of snow, although it is true that the Inuit do make more distinctions among types of snow than do
English speakers, the latter also make some distinctions (think “powder,” “slush,” “whiteout,”
and so forth). And it is also possible that thinking about snow may influence language, rather
than the other way around.
In a more direct test of the possibility that language influences thinking, Eleanor Rosch
(1973) [34] compared people from the Dani culture of New Guinea, who have only two terms for
color (“dark” and “bright”), with English speakers who use many more terms. Rosch
hypothesized that if language constrains perception and categorization, then the Dani should
have a harder time distinguishing colors than would English speakers. But her research found
that when the Dani were asked to categorize colors using new categories, they did so in almost
the same way that English speakers did. Similar results were found by Frank, Everett,
Fedorenko, and Gibson (2008), [35] who showed that the Amazonian tribe known as the Pirahã,
who have no linguistic method for expressing exact quantities (not even the number “one”), were
nevertheless able to perform matches with large numbers without problem.