I've got a big problem with that "experiment". Col...

2009-06-08T10:45:17.020-05:00

I've got a big problem with that "experiment". Color, like sound, is something that most people don't have "perfect pitch" for as adults.

"perfect pitch" with sounds and colors *can* be taught. The tonal languages of the Chinese have shown that they don't vary but 1/8th of a tone from day to day (or even years) for the same tonal word. They have perfect pitch.

The same can be done with light. Exact wavelengths of light can be memorized just like exact pitch. If we practice enough.

But really... who in the world do you know that practices perfect frequency color matching? Not many people.

So to use blue and green isn't a fair test. They're too close even for languages that *make* the distinction. In fact, how our eyes even *see* a color is dependent on the context of viewing that color (for the most part). There have been experiments at UW where in one picture, a square looks yellow and in another gray, but it's actually the same shade of green in both paintings.

I therefore can't agree with the conclusion.

"If we stopped people from being able to fluently ...

2008-02-22T12:36:00.000-06:00

"If we stopped people from being able to fluently access their language, then the cross-linguistic differences in perception went away."

Setting aside the question of how you stop people from doing this, I have to ask:

If you can remove a person's access to language, doesn't this still support the idea of hard-wired perceptions? Doesn't this simply make language a filter on our cognition, but not our perceptions?

Comments on Deric Bownds' MindBlog: Languages shape the nuts and bolts of our percepti...

I've got a big problem with that "experiment". Col...

"If we stopped people from being able to fluently ...