How grammar influences perception

Indigenous Australians who speak Murrinhpatha have shown how our mental processes can be shaped by the structure of our language. Murrinhpatha has free word order: subjects, objects and verbs can occur anywhere in a sentence. Eye-tracking studies show that Murrinhpatha speakers shown pictures of an event focus on the elements in a different order than English speakers do — all within milliseconds. Murrinhpatha is now thriving because of elders who survived brutal policies of forced assimilation. But many other Indigenous languages are dying or extinct, threatening to curtail our understanding of the diverse ways that humans can think.

Blogger Comments:

From the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics, thinking is the mental projection of the meanings of language. What we perceive is sensory impacts interpreted in terms of the meanings of language.