Lost in Translation

Image Gallery Linzie Hunter / www.linziehunter.co.uk

Lera Boroditsky’s journey to answer one of psychology’s most intriguing and fractious questions has been a curious one. She’s spent hours showing Spanish speakers videos of balloons popping, eggs cracking, and paper ripping. She’s scoured campuses for Russian speakers willing to spend an hour sorting shades of blue. She’s even traipsed to a remote aboriginal village in Australia where small children shook their heads at what they considered her pitiable sense of direction and took her hand to show her how to avoid being gobbled by a crocodile. Yet she needs little more than a teacup on her office coffee table to explain the essence of her research.

“In English,” she says, moving her hand toward the cup, “if I knock this cup off the table, even accidentally, you would likely say, ‘She broke the cup.’ ” In Japanese or Spanish, however, intent matters, she explains.

If one deliberately knocks the cup, there is a verb form to indicate as much. But if the act were an accident, Boroditsky says, a smile dancing across her lips as she translates from Spanish, the speaker would essentially say, “The cup broke itself.”

The question is: Does the fact that one language tends to play the blame game while the other does not mean that speakers of those languages think differently about what happened? If so, what might linguistic differences tell us about cognition, perception, and memory—and with what implications for such perennial debates as the influence of nature versus nurture? Welcome to the intensely spirited academic debate on which Boroditsky has spent the last decade shining a bright new light.

As anyone who’s studied a new language understands well, languages differ in myriad ways beyond simply having, as comedian Steve Martin once observed, “a different word for everything.” They may assign nouns different genders—in German, moon is masculine; in French and Spanish, feminine—or none. Others require specific verb choices depending on whether an action was completed or not, or whether the speaker witnessed it or is reporting secondhand.

Boroditsky is not a linguist. She is a cognitive scientist—specifically, an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University—who pays attention to what a speaker of a given language thinks, perceives, and remembers about an event. In that realm, the answer to the blame-game question turns out not to be obvious at all.

Boroditsky’s research suggests, for example, that the mechanics of using a language such as English, which tends to assign an agent to an action regardless of the agent’s intent, also tends to more vividly imprint that agent in the speaker’s mem­ory. She is amassing a body of intriguing and creative evidence that language influences how its speakers focus their attention, remember events and people, and think about the world around them. And these influences may provide insight into a given culture’s conception of time, space, color, or even justice.