Can they really distinguish between the impact of language on these domains rather than culture? It could be the language you speak, or it could be that you're surrounded exclusively by other people that operate this way.
French is a second language for many countries. So that may provide data as well.
Sure maybe you could isolate a bunch of scholars and give them a specification of Chinese and ask them to go at it, which is maybe what we do with Latin and Greek.
I would struggle to see how someone could earnestly argue the opposite, that language doesn't shape thought, when Chinese doesn't use conjugation, has looser notions of tense, has no direct/indirect article, uses glyphs instead of an alphabet, can be read top to bottom, right to left, left to right and doesn't use spaces to delimit words. That's even before we talk about tones or the highly monosyllabic nature of the language alters things like memorisation. (ever notice how Chinese people are often good at memorising numbers?)
Both are abstractions that use symbolic representation
Both are designed for human understanding
Both have quirks that make them better or worse at certain kinds of abstraction
comparison != analogy.
Any RTL native can confirm that they visualize time as flowing from right to left? Because this puzzles me a lot!
"Absence of negatively biased mental verbs in English slows down the development of Theory of Mind. Children acquiring Spanish (which has verbs indicating false belief) have better performance in false-belief tasks."
But as a Spanish speaker I don't know what verbs is this referring to. On top of my head I can only think of the word "disbelieve" which doesn't have an exact, single word translation, but that's the opposite of what the quote seems to imply. Other verbs like deceive, doubt, misunderstand or imagine do have matching translations in both languages. What am I missing here?
[1] according to https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/vie... for example. I don’t know enough Spanish to say if the verb really works this way. Verbs like this are called “contrafactive”
How does yiwei/creerse differ from "Juan doubts that they are going to promote him"?
Juan does not doubt, the speaker does.
In the "doubts" case, Juan believes that they are not going to promote him. There is no assertion regarding the truth value of that belief.
amarant•55m ago
Best I can describe it is that I gained a new perspective.