Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science | Hacker News Reader

Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science

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43 pointsDrierCycle47 comments

Intuitively, I agree with the thesis. But the example for Spanish confuses me. One of the illustrations says:

"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?

They gave the example of the verb yiwei in Mandarin. If you say “ta yiwei X” it means “s/he thinks X” with a strong connotation that X is in fact false. The Spanish equivalent is supposed to be the verb creerse [1], like if you say “Juan se cree que lo van a ascender” it means “Juan thinks that they are going to promote him” but with a strong connotation that he won’t in fact be promoted. English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false. The claim (for what it’s worth, I am skeptical) is that English speakers are slower to learn the concept that someone can have a false belief, because English lacks such a verb.

[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”

Asking which-eth is hard in English but easy in Tamil. I’m going to tell everyone that this is why list.indexOf is slow.

> English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false.

How does yiwei/creerse differ from "Juan doubts that they are going to promote him"?

Quite a bit, actually. It shows that Juan is aware of it, whereas in the Spanish equivalent he may actually believe it, even though it still is false. In a way you are very much illustrating the GP's point. And if I got it wrong then I am doing the same :)

Hah, now we have anecdotal evidence.

Juan does not doubt, the speaker does.

Note that creerse is creer+se.

TIL thanks, but the evidence is weak I'm afraid. English isn't my mother tongue, and it's 6am here. I misread that this "strong connotation" was about the subject (Juan) and not about the object (Promotion).

In "yiwei"/"creer" case, Juan believes that they are going to promote him (but his belief is not very well calibrated and is likely false). yiwei/creerse asserts something about the truth value of the belief, in addition to what the belief is.

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.

just to be sure. are you a native english speaker? only speak english?

The English term is misthinks or misbeliveves.

When they say "English", they mean the language people call English today, not the language that was called "English" in the 17th century.

In that case, "fantasize", "dream", or "wish" are verbs that come to mind for believing a lie.

"You wish" is a common retort for making an untrustworthy claim of belief, especially of an unrealistically rewarding future.

> English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false

Really? Huh, maybe. I suppose, guess, imagine, assume, opine, claim, that none of these verbs carry a strong enough connotation of falsehood. There's take for granted, but it's unwieldy. I fancy that the verb fancy would be very suitable for the job, but it makes one sound like an 1850s Southern Belle.

Oh yeah, "creerse" and "creérsela" definitely have different connotations from "creer" even if they're technically conjugations of the same verb.

I found an article that offers "fall for it" as a translation for "creérsela" (te la creíste/se la creyó) and I agree.

https://www.tellmeinspanish.com/grammar/creer-vs-creerse/

In the form of "creerse" it can also mean "believe in yourself" which used to have the same connotation of being mistakenly overconfident, although in the last couple of years I've started to see more "debes de creértela" Linkedin memes which have the opposite (true belief) connotation, more like "fake it till you make it".

If anyone's confused, don't worry. This verb always means "believe", the only difference is in the subtle connotations but they never affect the actual meaning.

The English approach here, as with other linguistic matters, is to solve the problem by using more words.

"Juan thinks they are going to promote him, but I'm not so sure."

Spoken English can easily express that meaning without the additional words by putting the stress on either “thinks” or maybe “they”.

Granted this doesn’t address the claim of the original post.

I'm not a native speaker but even for me it's obvious you can just say "naively thinks".

> If you say “ta yiwei X” it means “s/he thinks X” with a strong connotation that X is in fact false.

I was interested to learn just now that Chinese dictionaries don't bother to mention this. I assume the reason is that the analogous construction in Classical Chinese has no such implication.

By contrast, Chinese-English dictionaries vary from noting that 以为 "usually" refers to mistaken belief to outright defining it that way.

English has words that are both connotative and denotative for “they think X” where X is false. The denotative verbs are simply “misbelieve” or “misthink” if you know it is false.

The connotative form which immediately comes to mind is the various forms of “notion”. Its primary use case is to indicate that the thing it refers to is likely false and has no connection to reality.

I've never encountered these words until now.

Wasn’t Sapir-Whorf pretty much debunked? Is there a difference in what is being claimed here or is it resurrecting it under a different name?

This seems like the (broadly accepted, AFAIK) weak form of Sapir-Whorf (language has impacts on cognition) but not the (generally viewed as debunked) strong form (language places strict limits on the bounds of possible thought).

I'm actually on the fence about strong Sapir-Whorf now. It's rather suss that machines started exhibiting some form of <reasoning> capabilities the minute they could successfully parse natural language, and not a moment before.

To summarize the Wikipedia article on linguistic relativity, the "strong" hypothesis that language determines thought has been debunked. But there are many things that a language influences. To use a computer analogy, all mainstream programming languages are Turing complete, so you can express any computation in them. In this sense the language does not determine what programs you can write. But in practice, as any computer person will tell you, different languages are good at different things. And that is kind of this paper, they cite a lot of examples where English has poor vocabulary or odd quirks, and show by comparison to other languages that this measurably affects conclusions about certain cognitive abilities. The issue they're complaining about is like if you benchmarked Python programs and tried to draw conclusions about the speed limits of computing, but never tried C++ or assembly.

Its ridiculous to compare human language to a programming language, even by analogy. They are entirely different domains.

Tell it to the papers: https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~csg63/publications/onward24/onwar... https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.03916 As vague analogies go, much more ridiculous and vague things have been published and peer reviewed and even gotten significant citations. Like ecological niches and invasive species, DNA as genetic blueprints, selfish genes, ... About all that can be said about these is that they are closer to the truth than what came before, and that if you actually learn the field then you can appreciate how they kind of get it right.

Yet what about aphasia? There seems to be direct evidence that thought, action, language are in conflict rather than seamless, so language plays a weird role in that some of us are programmed and others are blissfuly unconnected to their effects.

If aphasia is evidence that some of us don't use language to think, then language is nothing more than a programming language.

Whatever programming language using language is irrelevant to people with aphasia.

Typically people develop aphasia after a stroke. This provides a natural before/after comparison. When for example Mark Brodie had a stroke, he wasn't able to speak - and he also wasn't able to read or write computer programs. This indicates that natural and programming languages use overlapping regions of the brain.

Regarding language being in conflict with other modes of thinking, there is indeed a "savant" effect of aphasia, where after an aphasia-inducing stroke people suddenly develop amazing abilities in visual art, music, or mathematical thinking. But it is not consistent - most people don't develop these. And it comes with impairment of emotions, memory, etc. So really what the evidence suggests is that some people suppress parts of their brain, and these injuries unlock that potential because the suppression mechanisms break. It's most likely a cultural thing - people act how they are "expected" to act. There is some evidence that females actually have more biological capability for math (in cultures with very high gender equality) but typically you see less performance, so the conclusion is that the culture essentially "programs" in the lower performance. It is probably the same with the supposed "conflict" between thought, action, and language - the culture treats these as distinct modes and inhibits cross-modal thinking like synesthesia.

Sure, but thought does not end or get impeded in aphasia, merely the ability to use language. People can reason, gesture, react, which tells us they're either divergent or entirely separate abilities. Any language is an external program that runs a cultural control system, not a communication system that directly connects mental states.

You can't generalize like that. Aphasia is a symptom - of course by definition it is merely the inability to use language. But people with stroke will typically show a lot of impairment, not only aphasia - they will have difficulties reasoning, gesturing, reacting, etc. Different people will have different abilities and different levels of impairment, but this tells you very little - it is not like each ability has its own little neuron in the brain, fMRI has confirmed that most activities involve several different parts of the brain. There are complex thoughts that require linguistic involvement to process, sign language and dancing combine gesturing with language, etc. The main thing the OP paper shows is that language is pervasive and intricately involved in how activities map to mental states.

I'm not sure it's generalizing, it's simply been demonstrated in testing.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07522-w

Yeah, so what that paper shows is that 6-7 cognitive tasks show low involvement with the language areas. What it doesn't show is that all cognitive tasks are independent of the language areas. As the paper itself admits, some forms of reasoning seem to involve language.

It demonstrates what divides the brain, actually, if you read her other papers and public layperson statements as well where she claims we don't use "language to think" as mental events are specific and language is arbitrary.

There's enough similarity there for an analogy, like the above posted.

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.

As a speaker of a latin language I can attest that English is poor at achieving several meanings that come very naturally in Portuguese, for example. English being a simpler language requires that you add several particles to get a different meaning, while in other languages you can use the normal gramatical variations of words to achieve the same effect. Just as an example, there are ways to discriminate size in words using terminations such as "ão" and "inho" (among others), and these have meanings that are not exactly the ones you expect from grammar but depend on the word you're using.

Unlike many other languages, English has grown because it's adaptable. It has almost as many borrowed words for advanced concepts as "native" words. It's hard to even distinguish anymore.

If anything, a solid counter argument can be made that Romance languages (descended from Latin) lack the flexibility of English and other Germanic languages.

Non primary English speakers frequently complain that English is more complicated than other languages. This is true. I'm a native speaker and only can read limited Spanish. Where I get hung up is the dependence on gender of objects. Similar experience with Japanese when I was studying that a few years ago.

I completely believe that primary language has a physical effect on the brain in terms of neural structure. It must have.

But since English is so adaptable, if there's a concept that is better expressed in another language we tend to adopt the words of other languages to express it.

However other languages seem to be less adaptable. For example, France has or had an official government ministry for decades to manage new foreign words entering the French language. To this day, there are newish specific French words for technologies coming from English speaking countries.

Another good example is some YouTube videos from India I've run across. (I turn on subtitles). But say the speaker is talking in Hindi. Many times more technical terms are English words or phrases that are freely interspersed with Hindi. They're borrowing the English words, with a bit of a Hindi dialect hitting the pronunciation.

Going back to Japanese, we see the same thing. I don't know if the JP gov has a language ministry.

But if you look at written Japanese text you definitely see that most numerology is written with western/English 0-9 characters mixed with katakana or hiragana. When you hear people speaking, and once your ear is oriented towards Japanese sounds, you can start to pick up on the adopted English words that are said with a native dialect emphasis.

Language imports are a poor substitute for grammatical flexibility. That's why French, for example, has limited need to import words directly: it can recreate the same meaning with native words. German is another great example, its grammar provides a lot of the flexibility that was lost in English. It is almost impossible to translate German philosophy into English without losing the natural flavor of word combinations that make German so adaptable.

> However other languages seem to be less adaptable. For example, France has or had an official government ministry for decades to manage new foreign words entering the French language. To this day, there are newish specific French words for technologies coming from English speaking countries.

It's not because French is not adaptable, it's because France wants to maintain the language as "pure". They have the same in Quebec.

When a new word appears, they consider that there should be an equivalent in French instead of just using the original word. Yes, they are mainly doing this for English (there are no French word for tsunami or iceberg) because they assume that French will slowly disappear if they don't protect it.

"Critically, the language one speaks or signs can have downstream effects on ostensibly nonlinguistic cognitive domains, ranging from memory, to social cognition, perception, decision-making, and more."

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, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken across multiple cultures. So there should be enough data to test the theory.

French is a second language for many countries. So that may provide data as well.

I mean I'm not really qualified or rigourous enough to prove this but if you have learned chinese and english it should be pretty damn obvious that it is linguistic. But in any case, human language and culture are intractable if you start trying to speak idiomatically.

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?)

Anecdotally, I think they're on to something! I've lived abroad enough to start thinking in a non-native language, I noticed that my thinking processes were different, and I would interpret even familiar situations differently.

Best I can describe it is that I gained a new perspective.

Strong Sapir-Whorf is debunked, and we do practically need a lingua franca that English does do okay at so why put in all the effort to change it now?

> These induced biases are not confined to the visual modality; in auditory tests, speakers of left-to-right systems conceptualize time as flowing in that direction too.

Any RTL native can confirm that they visualize time as flowing from right to left? Because this puzzles me a lot!

For me it's neither. Time seems to flow from back to front, as if I'm seated in a chair moving backwards; I can see the past as it recedes (moving away in the direction I'm facing), and can't see the future (I'd need eyes in the back of my head).

This section of the article is interesting:

Philosopher Paul Grice suggested a handful of simple rules that apply ‘to conversation as such, regardless of its subject matter’ [106]. The Gricean individual is a rational agent who is expected to quickly provide just enough information, not more, nor less, than necessary and relevant in any given communicative situation. When such an individual flouts one of these principles, their interlocutors will infer the intended meaning of an utterance is different from its literal meaning.

That's a useful observation. It brings out the problems of business-speak and political-speak. It isn't entirely a language distinction. It's possible to obfuscate and blither in many languages. Orwell observed this decades ago. Some languages seem to encourage it more than others, but that may be a linguistic style thing more than a language thing.

LLMs are sometimes given prompt preludes to push them into a Gricean mode. Without an incentive, LLMs tend to go into stochastic parrot mode and blither.

I, for one, welcome our new Lojban-speaking overlords.

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