Marysia Popowska is a final year student in English Language and Linguistics. In this post, she shares a summary of her summer research project, which was funded by Warwick's Undergraduate Research Support Scheme (URSS).

Language and Perception

You might already know that linguistics is an interdisciplinary field, which means it overlaps with other sciences, such as biology, computer science or psychology. In this post, we are going to focus on the last one and discuss how language and our perceptions intertwine.

As a little warm-up, listen to these two songs:

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJ1K2kDYV6Q&ab_channel=PederB.Helland

2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8LvAiJYKoSM&ab_channel=LastGangRadio

How do they make you feel? Does it feel like time flows differently while listening to each of them? Why could that be?

You probably instinctively know that certain stimuli change how we feel and experience the world: slow music makes us relaxed, unpleasant smells influence how our food tastes and so on. In the case of songs, the rhythm of the song can make time seem to be passing faster or slower. The voice of the singer in the first song also conveys sadness so strongly the listeners can also feel it. The different songs have an impact on how we feel due to their differing rhythm, tone and prosody.

But did you know that words themselves can also have an impact on us and our perceptions?

For instance, Russian has completely separate words for light blue (“goluboy”) and dark blue (“siniy”) whereas in English, as you might have noticed it is always blue (but can be either dark or light). Below is an example from Winawer et al. (2007):

How would you describe the shades of blue in this chart?

Participants were asked to choose the square on the bottom that matched the one on the top in colour. As a result, Russian native speakers were able to better distinguish and categorise these colours than English speakers. Similarly, Mongolian and Mandarin speakers showed the impact of linguistic categories on perception, with some colours being more easily recognised than others based on the language spoken (He et al., 2019).

From studies like these, we can infer that:

• languages put the world around us in categories (which can differ from one language to another)
• the language each of us speaks directly influences our perception of the world

If you'd like to learn more about this and other fascinating examples, I highly recommend this TedTalk from Lera Boroditsky, a cognitive scientist at the University of California San Diego.

My Research Project

Interested in this area, I wanted to create my own experiment focusing on perception and language. This summer I completed a research project (as part of URSS here at Warwick) focused on how an individual's idea of language (specifically grammatical structures) influences perception. In order to understand it better, let's take a look at these two sentences:

• I read a book.
• I was reading a book.

How do these two examples differ? Which one do you think implied an unfinished action? Which one seems to take a longer period of time?

These are examples of two aspects present in English: perfective and imperfective. They signify whether an action has come to an end or not. In the first sentence, we know a person started and finished reading the book. In the second one, we know a person was reading a book, but there is no indication as to whether or not they finished reading it. The first sentence signifies a shorter, finished action and is perfective, while the second one is imperfective (as it signifies a longer, unfinished action).

My study looked at whether verbs in the imperfective aspect will make the distance seem longer and similarly, if using verbs in the perfective aspect change the perception of physical distance and make distances seem shorter.

For my research project, 20 participants were shown numerous sets of two lines of the same length. In each set of lines (out of 9), the first line was shown without any sound as a control group, whereas the second line was shown along with a recording of words of either perfective or imperfective aspect or a mix of both (neutral).

An example of an image seen by participants during the test.

Overall, there were 18 lines presented in consecutive order and 3 different lengths within sets (20%, 50% and 75%). Here are the averages of each category:

Imperfective - 51.39%
Neutral (mixed) - 50.67%
Perfective - 50.26%
No sound - 51.06%

As you can see the differences are small between the categories. On top of that, there was no statistical significance in any of those results. As all professors always say "No result is a result in and of itself". Based on this study, the aspect of verbs does not have an impact on the visual perception of the length of these lines. It seems that whether or not the verb signifies a finished or unfinished action does not influence the visual length massively.

This also goes counterintuitively to other studies that discussed grammatical concepts' impact on perception. Knowing that, this area should be further investigated with subsequent studies on the topic. Despite that, this research project serves as a good starting point for learning more about verb aspects and their impact on visual perception of length. I thoroughly enjoyed planning the experiment from scratch and executing it. For another study on this topic, a larger sample size would be better and allow for more definitive conclusions. Another improvement to my study lies within the test design - perhaps it would be better to have fewer examples of the control group (no sound), have more variations of line lengths and mix up the recordings more thoroughly.

Activity

How do you think different parts of the language can impact how you view the world? Try to find examples online from each category below. You can take inspiration from Lera Boroditsky's Ted Talk or any other sources.

1. Grammatical Structures (e.g. passive and active voice, pronouns)
2. Lexis (e.g. no terms for certain items, more specific distinction of some terms)
3. Pronunciation (e.g. how are sounds distinguished depending on your mother tongue)

References

He, H., Li, J., Xiao, Q., Jiang, S., Yang, Y., & Zhi, S. (2019). Language and Color Perception: Evidence From Mongolian and Chinese Speakers. Frontiers in Psychology, 10. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00551

Meteyard, L., Bahrami, B., & Vigliocco, G. (2007). Motion Detection and Motion Verbs. Psychological Science, 18(11), 1007–1013. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.02016.x

Minor, S., Mitrofanova, N., & Ramchand, G. (2022). Fine-grained time course of verb aspect processing. PLOS ONE, 17(2), e0264132–e0264132. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0264132

Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M. C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., & Boroditsky, L. (2007). Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(19), 7780–7785. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0701644104