A neuroscientific approach to linguistic relativity

Abstract

Between the 1920s and the 1950s, linguists Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir shaped a hypothesis that suggests that the world we perceive is distorted by the language we speak: We see the world through a linguistic filter. This hypothesis has been interpreted and discussed countless times in the last fifty years from anthropology, sociology, linguistics and cognitive science. To Whorf, the words of our language determine the way we see the world: in the case of the rainbow, the bands of different colors that emerge from the light continuum would actually be a product of the way in which we have subdivided and named the spectrum. Color discrimination is a bad example of this theory, since it is not the result of linguistic but innate filters -product of biological mechanisms in our retinas and brains. But the “rainbow” phenomenon is relevant as an example of Categorical Perception, in which categories determine or distort our perception beyond mere physical differences: we see two shades of red that are 100 nm apart as the most similar than one shade of red and a shade of yellow at the same distance on the spectrum. Even if colors are innate categories, most of the words in our language are the names of categories that we learn through experience. The question then is if learning these categories generates changes in our perception like those that occur with the colors of the rainbow. Supported by methods that measure brain activity before, during and after learning new categories and their names, cognitive neuroscience brings new elements to study linguistic relativity from a scientific perspective. This essay recounts these approaches in order to stimulate multidisciplinary dialogues around this controversial hypothesis.