Dan Slobin: “Those parts of language which are background, which you learn from when you're very little, do change the way we think about things”

“Bilinguals have some advantages in problem solving and finding new ways to acquire information”
“Bilinguals have some advantages in problem solving and finding new ways to acquire information”
(02/11/2010)

The psycholinguist Dan I. Slobin, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has made significant contributions to research into child language acquisition. His many achievements include demonstrating the importance of cross-linguistic comparison in the study of language acquisition and of psycholinguistics in general, through research carried out in the United States, Turkey, Israel, Croatia, Spain and Holland. Slobin contends that the acquisition of linguistic competence requires rests on learning certain modes of thinking specific to language, which he refers to as “learning to think for speaking”, and over the last 20 years he has also carried out extensive research into sign language acquisition and linguistics. Professor Slobin was a guest speaker at the 6th International Congress on Language Acquisition, organized by the Association for the Study of Language Acquisition, which took place in September at the Faculty of Philology of the UB.

“Bilinguals have some advantages in problem solving and finding new ways to acquire information”
“Bilinguals have some advantages in problem solving and finding new ways to acquire information”
02/11/2010

The psycholinguist Dan I. Slobin, Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, has made significant contributions to research into child language acquisition. His many achievements include demonstrating the importance of cross-linguistic comparison in the study of language acquisition and of psycholinguistics in general, through research carried out in the United States, Turkey, Israel, Croatia, Spain and Holland. Slobin contends that the acquisition of linguistic competence requires rests on learning certain modes of thinking specific to language, which he refers to as “learning to think for speaking”, and over the last 20 years he has also carried out extensive research into sign language acquisition and linguistics. Professor Slobin was a guest speaker at the 6th International Congress on Language Acquisition, organized by the Association for the Study of Language Acquisition, which took place in September at the Faculty of Philology of the UB.

You are known for inventing the concept of "learning to think for speaking". Do linguistic differences affect only the way in which we process language or do they influence other cognitive processes as well?

 
That's a really important question and it doesn't yet have a clear answer. For many things that we do it doesn't matter what language we speak, because we have ways of seeing things, given the way our eyes and ears work, we use our hands to do things and we don't talk to ourselves all the time saying, "I will reach for that", and, "My fingers have to close as I get closer..." We don't use language for reaching and for picking something up. Where language is important is in all of the parts of our mental life where there is no objective material reality - whether we consider somebody's actions right or wrong, whether we consider something dangerous or beautiful. Our ideas about everything - history, economics, religion, morality - come only through language, and the question is whether those things can be influenced by the particular language that we speak. I think the answer is sometimes. I don't think we can give a general principle for it, but think of the Catholic concept of sin -if there wasn't a word for sin, we wouldn't have the concept. Somebody would have to teach us that this behaviour and that behaviour fall into the same category and that we call it "sin". Those aren't natural categories, that's a category invented by religion. But then it doesn't matter which language we speak, because we say "sin" or "pecado" and we're talking about the same concept, because it comes from the same religious institution.
 
The question becomes really complicated when something is built into language that isn't just a name - because names can be translated from one language to another - but a way of thinking. For example, in some languages when you talk about something you know you have to use a form of the verb that says, "I know this because I myself experienced it", or another form of the verb that says, "I know this because somebody told me about it but I didn't experience it", or, "I know this because I came to that conclusion from inference". If you have to do that every time you make any statement, you must question whether it influences the way you think about the validity of your statements. It's possible, but I don't know yet how to do a systematic experiment to prove it.
 
I'll give you a very simple example that I think shows there is an effect: we're talking English now, I don't have to worry about calling you or usted, it simply isn't an issue that arises in English. As soon as we switch to Spanish, however, I have to think, "Ah, you are usted, so if I called you it would mean something else". So speaking Spanish forces me to attend to this dimension of social relations. But I don't have to think about your gender. If I were speaking Hebrew or Arabic to you, I would have to think, "Yes, I'm speaking to a woman, so I have to use this pronoun, this verb ending...". So I think that language, if it's habitual and obligatory, does shape the way we think about some aspects of experience. I think those parts of language which are background, which are unconscious, habitual, which you learn from when you're very little, do change the way we think about things. If you want to learn how to speak Japanese you have twenty-five different ways to place yourself and the person you're speaking to in terms of status and respect and you can only do that by learning the social hierarchies through language. There are a lot of people in the world carrying out interesting research into these areas, and in some cases it's very clear that language does affect the way we think, in other cases it's clear that language does not, and there are many thousands of cases that we simply haven't studied yet.
 
You have devoted much of your research to sign language. Scientifically speaking, what are the benefits of studying this language and why do you find it so interesting?
 
The study of sign languages changes our idea about what is natural to language, what is universal to language, because many of the things that we find in all of the spoken languages are there because you have to use your voice, whereas in sign language you can use your hands and you can point to locations, and your hands and your face and your body are part of the language. So much of what we think is natural grammar is due to the problems of spoken language, where you can only say one word at a time; you can't say two words at the same time, you can't point to something you've said before, so you have to have words like this and that or he and she to point with words, because you can't point with your eyes or your fingers. So it helps us understand much more about how spoken languages are constructed, to see how the mind can construct a language without speech, its different possibilities. So sign languages, I think, have revolutionized our idea of linguistic universals.
 

Here, in Catalonia, we are in a bilingual society. Do you think that learning two or more languages allows us to experience new ways of perceiving reality and makes us more versatile and better at acquiring knowledge?

 
There's evidence that children who grow up with two languages have more cognitive flexibility, they can try to solve problems from several different directions. I don't think bilinguals are smarter than monolinguals but I think they have some advantages in problem solving and finding new ways to acquire information. There's also some evidence that it's better for the brain -that bilinguals in old age have fewer problems of mental deterioration. Apparently, speaking several languages builds up connections in the brain which then protect you from deterioration of particular parts of the brain. But this is all very new research though, it's not yet definitive.
 
In an interview in 1988 you said that by understanding the innate aspects of linguistic development we could understand a great deal about ourselves as human beings. Have your many years of research given you a philosophical view on what it is to be human and on our potential for learning?
 
Of course, I'm a psycholinguist, so I deal with psychology and the language part of psychology. I think that by learning about many different languages I have seen how arbitrary our world really is - how what we think is natural about the world is to a great extent because that's the way we've learned to talk about it. In that quotation from 1988 I was much more interested in what I call the 'innate factors' of language, but I don't believe that any more. I think what's innate is the capacity to build many different kinds of languages, but the structure of language itself is not part of what we were born with, so by gradually changing what I believed in 1988 I think I have more respect for the human mind, because what it has are capacities to build endlessly new types of patterns for storing information, for retrieving information, for recognizing the patterns, for communicating them to other people.
 
So philosophically speaking, I think the diversity of language gives me a respect for the flexibility of human beings and at the same time a kind of angry frustration with people who don't make use of that flexibility, who because they've been taught to think about the world in a certain ideological system - be it politics or religion or ideology of one kind or another - get stuck thinking that that is reality, rather than thinking that it's simply one way of dealing with life's situations. So it has made me more of a relativist, whereas scientists prefer being absolutists, because then they can say, "We have found out the right theory, this is where everything fits...". Or perhaps we should say that there are two types of scientists: there are those who like things to be orderly and to be predictable and reduced to a formula, and they like formal linguistics, where they can say that language has a limited number of patterns, so the diversity is not very interesting as it's diversity of a single pattern; then there is the other type, like me, that likes complexity and mystery and ambiguity, and I enjoy finding things that don't fit the pattern, because then I'm challenged to look for a new kind of pattern, which I think is exciting.