ProspectsAn important general question in linguistics and psycholinguistics concerns the extent to which the structure of language influences thinking. [9; 10] As the experiments at the MPI for Psycholinguistics show that speakers of a language are flexible in the choice of their cognitive planning units, it may be expected that speakers of different languages differ considerably in their approach to planning units. In simple statements in German, Dutch and English, the agent is named first and then the action. This is why the speaker can wait to decide which verb to use until he or she is naming the agent. But what happens in languages, in which the action must be expressed at the beginning of the sentence? Do these speakers always determine first what is happening in a scene? Or do they also focus first on the agent in this case? The MPI researchers in Nimwegen are currently investigating these and similar questions with scientists from the Language and Cognition department of their Institute. To do this, they are carrying out similar experiments to those described above in languages in which the verb is placed at the beginning of the sentence, for example Tzeltal, which is spoken in Mexico and Tagalog, which is spoken in the Philippines. With the help of such empirical studies comparing different languages, the psycholinguists can explore how language and thinking are related to each other. m.medicalxpress/news/2014-02-temporal.html
Posted on: Fri, 14 Mar 2014 07:20:50 +0000
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