Words as Windows to Thought: The Case of Object Representation

Languages differ in how they express thought, leading some researchers to suggest that speakers of different languages perceive objects differently. Other researchers, in contrast, argue that words are windows to thought – reflecting its structure without modifying it. Here, we explore the case study of object representation. Recent studies of Japanese, Chinese, and English indicate that speakers of these languages do not perceive objects differently, despite their grammatical differences. Grammatical structures provide frames for words that can select among meanings without affecting underlying object perception.Psycholog

‘She says, he says’: Does the sex of an instructor interact with the grammatical gender of targets in a perspective-taking task?

Aims and objectives: It has been claimed that grammatical gender can influence the perception of objects as being potentially more ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. The present study investigated effects of facilitation or interference on object selection by speakers whose L1 marks grammatical gender even when selecting objects in an L2 (English) which does not mark grammatical gender. Additionally, and in order to establish whether bilingualism itself influenced performance owing to a proposed bilingual advantage in inhibitory control, we investigated whether bilinguals would be more efficient than monolinguals at taking the allocentric perspective and switching between perspectives. Methodology: Participants were asked to select objects by an instructor whose biological sex (and voice) was either congruent or incongruent with the grammatical gender of the object to be selected. Two groups of 16 bilinguals each were recruited on the basis of whether their L1s marked for grammatical gender or not, and a further group of 16 monolingual English speakers were tested as a control. Data and analysis: Groups were compared by means of mixed-design repeated measures ANOVAs with response times for target selections as the dependent variables. Findings: When tested in English, bilinguals whose L1 marked grammatical gender showed no effect of gender congruency in this task, nor did bilinguals outperform monolinguals in taking the allocentric perspective or in perspective switching. Originality: For the first time, potential grammatical gender effects were investigated on a task where the fast and accurate processing of real male and female voices is fundamental to the efficiency of object selection performance. Implications: The present findings are interpreted as evidence that the effects of L1 grammatical gender on tasks performed in an L2 do not extend to tasks where the link between biological sex and grammatical gender is not made explicit. </jats:sec

Casting Light Upon The Great Endarkenment

While the Enlightenment promoted thinking for oneself independent of religious authority, the ‘Endarkenment’ (Millgram 2015) concerns deference to a new authority: the specialist, a hyperspecializer. Non-specialists need to defer to such authorities as they are unable to understand their reasoning. Millgram describes how humans are capable of being serial hyperspecializers, able to move from one specialism to another. We support the basic thrust of Millgram’s position, and seek to articulate how the core idea is deployed in very different ways in relation to extremely different philosophical areas. We attend to the issue of the degree of isolation of different specialists and we urge greater emphasis on parallel hyperspecialization, which describes how different specialisms can be embodied in one person at one time

Living between languages: The politics of translation in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret and Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers

This is the author's final draft post-refereeing as published in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 2012 47: 207 DOI:10.1177/0021989412440433. The online version of this article can be found at: http://jcl.sagepub.com/content/47/2/20

Photography as an act of collaboration

The camera is usually considered to be a passive tool under the control of the operator. This definition implicitly constrains how we use the medium, as well as how we look at – and what we see in – its interpretations of scenes, objects, events and ‘moments’. This text will suggest another way of thinking about – and using – the photographic medium. Based on the evidence of photographic practice (mine and others’), I will suggest that, as a result of the ways in which the medium interprets, juxtaposes and renders the elements in front of the lens, the camera is capable of depicting scenes, events and moments that did not exist and could not have existed until brought into being by the act of photographing them. Accordingly, I will propose that the affective power of many photographs is inseparable from their ‘photographicness’ – and that the photographic medium should therefore be considered as an active collaborator in the creation of uniquely photographic images

Propagation of social representations

Based on a minimal formalism of social representations as a set of associated cognems, a simple model of propagation of representations is presented. Assuming that subjects share the constitutive cognems, the model proposes that mere focused attention on the set of cognems in the field of common conscience may replicate the pattern of representation from context into subjects, or, from subject to subject, through actualization by language, where cognems are represented by verbal signs. Limits of the model are discussed, and evolutionist perspectives are presented with the support of field data

Personal totems

Totems are revered symbols or emblems of a family or clan. Totems are objects which stand as symbols of something powerful. Personal Totems is the group name that I give to my prints, which represent my ongoing struggle to represent images with sentient power. The prints serve as remnants of glimpses into the unknowable and elemental forces which power life. The totems illustrate the undefinable pantheistic quality in all things. They represent mystery. Printmaking is a repetitive process which enables me to duplicate imagery in an edition, and to carry images over directly from one print to the next. There is a personal mythology and story to the development of the imagery from one urn-like guardian form to the split into two stele, and then the re-envelopment of the stele by the mound shape. The evolution of the imagery developed spontaneously and naturally as a result of the interaction of the forms. [more in manuscript]California State University, Northridge. Department of Art

Statistical physics of language dynamics

Language dynamics is a rapidly growing field that focuses on all processes related to the emergence, evolution, change and extinction of languages. Recently, the study of self-organization and evolution of language and meaning has led to the idea that a community of language users can be seen as a complex dynamical system, which collectively solves the problem of developing a shared communication framework through the back-and-forth signaling between individuals. We shall review some of the progress made in the past few years and highlight potential future directions of research in this area. In particular, the emergence of a common lexicon and of a shared set of linguistic categories will be discussed, as examples corresponding to the early stages of a language. The extent to which synthetic modeling is nowadays contributing to the ongoing debate in cognitive science will be pointed out. In addition, the burst of growth of the web is providing new experimental frameworks. It makes available a huge amount of resources, both as novel tools and data to be analyzed, allowing quantitative and large-scale analysis of the processes underlying the emergence of a collective information and language dynamics