Recent research conducted at Georgia State University shows that native language affects how people convey information from a young age and hints at the presence of a universal system of communication.
Şeyda Özçalışkan, a professor in the Psychology Department, has been researching the connection between language and thought for years. Her latest study, “What the development of gesture with and without speech can tell us about the effect of language on thought,” published in Language and Cognition, is a continuation of previous work with adults.
For this study, Özçalışkan, in collaboration with Susan Goldin-Meadow at the University of Chicago and Che Lucero at Cornell University, focused on children ages 3 to 12. The children either spoke English or Turkish. They were asked to use their hands to act out specific actions, such as running into a house.
“English and Turkish were the primary comparisons because they differ in terms of the way you talk about events,” said Özçalışkan, a native Turkish speaker herself.
“If you’re speaking Turkish, if you want to describe someone running into a house, you have to chunk it up. You say, ‘he’s running and then he enters the house,'” she said. “But if it’s in English, they’ll just say ‘he ran into the house,’ all in one compact sentence. As such, it is easier to express both running (manner of motion) and entering (path of motion) together in a single expression in English than in Turkish.
2023-12-06 03:41:03
Original from phys.org