Language and Thought

(An insight through Hindi)

SE 367 Introduction to Cognitive Science Course Project

Sumit VermaMentor – Dr. Amitabha Mukerjee, Dr. Achla M Raina

Whorfianism

Differences can be due to :- Semantic/Structure View of the abstract world

The Basics

BackgroundHindi (SOV) v/s English (SVO)

Experiment Procedure Participants

8 Mess/Hall Workers (Hindi Speakers) and 21 X 2 Amazon Mechanical Turk HIT’s (English Speakers)

Part A – Structure of a Language

Results

American English Speakers Indian Hindi Speakers

Background (Bihari Hindi v/s Standard UP/MP Hindi)

Bihari Hindi – Inanimate objects treated as

Masculine

Standard Hindi – Gender of the object depends on

a set of rules

Examples:- Baarish ho rha hai and Baarish ho rhi hai

Experiment Procedure

Participants – 10 1st Year IITK students from Bihar +

10 IITK students from UP/MP/Delhi

Part B – Grammatical Gender in Language

बा�रि�श

Results

Bihari Hindi Speakers Standard Hindi Speakers (UP/MP)

चा�बा�

http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html Linguistic Relativity – Lera Boroditsky (Galley – Article 00567) The Linguistic Survey of India, vol. v. part ii. (1903) Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and

Semantics. In Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (Eds.,) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Cognition.

Semantic structure in improvised communication, (CogSci2011) Marieke Schouwstra, et. al (Anouschka van Leeuwen, Nicky Marien,

Marianne Smit, Henri ette de Swart)�•

References

Thank You!!!!