Grammatical structures can lead people to focus on different details of a crime scene.
The way people order their words in a sentence influences which details they tend to focus on in the world, Boroditsky has found.
In English, subjects in a sentence get the attention because they do the acting. In Spanish, people use the passive form of the verb far more often: Y has something done to it, rather than X doing something to Y.
Boroditsky has found in her research that eye-witness testimony tracks with this difference. Spanish-speakers tend to notice what happened in a given situation, while English-speakers focus on who was at fault — a reflection of the grammatical structures that dictate how life unfolds.
What you call a color determines how much you notice it.
In English, people categorize the color blue one way: blue. There may be shades of blue, such as teal or turquoise, or light and dark blue, but they are all variants of the color blue.
Other cultures group colors differently, some with fewer names and some with more. Cultures with more categories are better at identifying distinct shades, Boroditsky's research has found.
Russians, for example, use the words goluboy and siniy to refer to lighter blues and darker blues, respectively. When Boroditsky has asked people to identify shades of blue and sort blue squares by lightness and darkness, brain scans show those who speak Russian are often much faster and better at the task than English-speakers.
Inanimate objects take on human descriptions of gender.
In English, words carry no gender. But in other languages, like German and Spanish, words can be masculine or feminine.
Boroditsky's research has found that the way people often describe objects correlates with the object's given gender in a language.
In German, for instance, "bridge" carries a feminine pronoun, and Boroditsky said Germans are more likely to refer to bridges as "beautiful" or "elegant," both typically feminine traits. Spanish-speakers, meanwhile, will refer to bridges as "strong" or "sturdy," as the Spanish word is masculine.
Time can flow in all different directions.
Consider the Kukutai, a tribe of aboriginal Australians who orient themselves and other objects in the world based on cardinal directions, such as north or south — not relative directions of up, down, left, or right, which are generally based on the body.
As a result, the Kukutai perceive time not as a left-to-right movement, as much of the world does, but as a west-east one. This means that if a person is facing north, time passes from left to right. But if they turn 180 degrees, to face south, now time passes from right to left.
What starts as a linguistic difference, Boroditsky says, quickly becomes a cognitive difference once a person tries to map their language system onto the physical world.
Source: Business Insider India