Essay On The Influence Of Language Influence On Language

Languages Influence on Thought and Cognition

Language is an incredibly valuable communication method, as it enables knowledge, understanding, and many forms of meaning to be conveyed, and provides the ability to gain a sense of self and of others (Vaughan & Hogg, 2014). Further, the idea that language may influence, or even control thought and cognition has been extensively debated amongst social psychologist and linguists for decades. These debates have produced many diverse theories and concepts. However, with countless diverse hypotheses defining this subject selecting the most accurate and suitable theory has become problematic. Some social psychologists believe that language controls all thought and that the structural differences

It enables the exchange of knowledge, opinions, beliefs, emotions, and unconscious thoughts and emotions (Eifring, & Theil, 2005). Language is a form of communication, and is defined as a system of sounds conveying meaning (Eifring, & Theil, 2005; Vaughan, & Hogg, 2014). Language is regulated by organising meaningless sounds into basic elements of meaning (Vaughan, & Hogg, 2014). These sounds are then either organised by morphological rules or syntactic rules, with morphological rules governing words and syntactic rules governing sentences (Eifring, & Theil, 2005; Vaughan, & Hogg, 2014). Further, it is through the shared knowledge of these rules that enables the comprehension of voluminous meaningful sounds, or preferentially, language (Eifring, & Theil, 2005; Vaughan, & Hogg,

This study aimed to investigate whether or not people whose languages dictated that they write from right to left, or from left to right would affect how these individuals would construct visual images (Maass et al., 2009). The study involved taking speakers of English (left-to-right writers) and speakers of Arabic (right-to-left) and observing how they would spatially construct a picture of a man and woman standing next to each other (Maass et al., 2009). English speakers were consistently found to place the man to the left of the woman, whereas the Arabic speakers were consistently found to place the man to the right of the woman (Maass et al., 2009). It was concluded that the English and Arabic speakers’ respective language-rules were subconsciously influencing how they organised their pictures, and in extension, their thoughts (Maass et al., 2009). However, this study does show limitations, specifically in that they only used English and Arabic speakers, and that gender roles may have affected the results. This shows a further need for research. Nevertheless, a further studies exists supporting linguistic relativity.

Lucy (2004) investigated the intellectual tendencies of English speakers and Yucatec Mayan speakers, finding that English speakers were much more likely to group nouns into lexical groups depending on