Monday, July 07, 2008

Wow

This is interesting. It will be cool to see what suppositions prove correct.
The research challenges the idea that the language we speak inevitably shapes the way we think when we are not speaking. This study is the first to test the notion with respect to word order.

"Our data suggest that the ordering we use when representing events in a nonverbal format is not highly susceptible to language's influence," Goldin-Meadow and her co-authors write. "Rather, there appears to be a natural order that humans use when asked to represent events nonverbally. Indeed, the influence may well go in the other direction--the ordering seen in our nonverbal tasks may shape language in its emerging stages."

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