欢迎报考广东财经大学硕士研究生,祝你考试成功!(第 2 页 共 5 页)
into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable
unpredictable differences emerged.
Just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently. In the
past decade cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they
think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as
space, time and causality could be constructed by language.
For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous
languages don't use terms like “left” and “right”. Instead, everything is talked about in terms of
absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, and west), which means you say things like
“There's an ant on your southwest leg.” To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, “Where are you
going?”, and an appropriate response might be, “A long way to the south-southwest. How about
you?” If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't get past hello.
About a third of the world's languages rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of
this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying
oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform
navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big
difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.
Differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial
knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number,
musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently
about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?
To find out, my colleague Alice Gaby and I traveled to Australia and gave Pormpuraawans
sets of pictures that showed temporal progressions (for example, pictures of a man at different
ages, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled
photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate
sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers
arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written
from right to left).
Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time
went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on.
Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans
not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct
their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's
languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South
America, the future is behind and the past in front.
In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For
example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to
say things like “John broke the vase” even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would
be more likely to say “the vase broke itself.” Such differences between languages have profound
consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency,
what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.
In studies conducted by Caitlin Fausey at Stanford, speakers of English, Spanish and
Japanese watched videos of two people popping balloons, breaking eggs and spilling drinks either
intentionally or accidentally. Later everyone got a surprise memory test: For each event, can you