From Ananova: Language influences the way you think.
Speakers of different languages not only describe the world differently but think about it differently too, according to a new study.
Researchers used a cartoon featuring black and white cat Sylvester to study how language was reflected in the gestures people made.
Dr Sotaro Kita of the University of Bristol's Department of Experimental Psychology, showed the cartoon to a group of native English, Japanese and Turkish speakers and then watched their gestures as they described the action they had seen.
He found speakers of the three different languages used different gestures to depict the same event, which appeared to reflect the way the structure of their languages expressed that event.
For example, when describing a scene where Sylvester swings on a rope, the English speakers used gestures showing an arc trajectory and the Japanese and Turkish speakers tended to use straight gestures showing the motion but not the arc.
Dr Kita suggests this is because Japanese and Turkish have no verb that corresponds to the English intransitive verb ‘to swing’. [continue]
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