Episode 107: Language and Thought around the World, Part 2

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EPISODE 107: Language and Thought around the World, Part 2, with Asifa Majid

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On This Episode

In the continuation of a conversation about language and thought, the cognitive psychologist Asifa Majid talks about why most studies on the topic have focused on English speakers, where in the brain language is processed, why some languages have trouble describing sensory input while others do not, and where language studies should go next.

This episode was recorded on June 2, 2023.
Released on November 8, 2023.

The conversation follows Episode 106.

Guest

Asifa Majid is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Oxford who studies the relationship among language, culture, and mind. At Radcliffe, she worked on a book that will synthesize her wide-ranging empirical work to elucidate which aspects of cognition are fundamentally shared and which are language- or culture-specific.

Credits

Ivelisse Estrada is your cohost and the editorial lead at Harvard Radcliffe Institute (HRI), where she edits Radcliffe Magazine.

Alan Catello Grazioso is the executive producer of BornCurious and the senior multimedia manager at HRI.

Jeff Hayash is a freelance sound engineer and recordist.

Marcus Knoke is a multimedia intern at HRI, a Harvard College student, and the general manager of Harvard Radio Broadcasting.

Heather Min is your cohost and the senior manager of digital strategy at HRI.

Anna Soong is the production assistant at HRI.

Transcript

[MUSIC]

Heather Min:
Welcome to BornCurious. This is the second part of our conversation with Asifa Majid, a professor of cognitive science at the University of Oxford and Radcliffe’s 2022–2023 William Bentinck-Smith Fellow.

Ivelisse Estrada:
We are your cohosts. I’m Ivelisse Estrada.

Heather Min:
I’m Heather Min.

Ivelisse Estrada:
If you’re just joining us, we’ve been engaged in an enlightening discussion with Asifa about her interest in language documentation and the significance of language extinction and preservation.

Heather Min:
So be sure to listen to part one before diving into this episode. That way, you won’t miss out on essential context and insights.

Ivelisse Estrada:
So without further ado, let us continue.

Heather Min:
Thank you, Asifa, for being our guest and continuing our conversation.

Asifa Majid:
Thank you.

Heather Min:
I have a basic question. Why have most of these studies on language and thought been focusing and using people who speak English? Is it because of English-speaking research centers and universities are the people who have come up with these methodologies? Or what?

Asifa Majid:
Yes. And also convenience. The history of psychology—most of the studies have been done with undergraduates who study psychology. It’s mostly young women, 18 to 22 years old.

And I think because there’s been a presupposition that psychologists are trying to figure out core aspects about how the mind and brain works, one person is as good as another in trying to capture that. I think things are shifting, and people are recognizing, we want to capture those core properties but also account for the range that we find.

Even within a single culture, we know that there is variation. So, there’s individual differences that the one, the lowest level, but also kind of more structured variation by class, maybe by race, by what people are doing. So as an undergraduate who’s spending most of their time indoors on a laptop, learning intensively, is that capturing the same kind of properties as if we go to, say, a forester who’s working on landscape, spending their time outdoors most of the time?

So would we capture the same kinds of visual perception, memory, reasoning? I think psychologists have been lured, maybe, by the ease of recruiting certain kinds of participants. And maybe that shapes the kinds of questions that they ask as well.

It’s been critical for a lot of psychology to use experimental methods, where everything is very well-controlled. You can manipulate things and know exactly what an outcome is due to, whereas using more naturalistic methods, it’s more difficult sometimes to interpret the data. I think the challenge has been to try and figure out methods that you can apply to a more diverse set of peoples and maybe come up with studies that can work in the field or combine fieldwork with more controlled, lab-based experimental work.

Heather Min:
Are more people going out into the world and talking to the forester as well as people in remote parts who don’t have access to psychology laboratories?

Asifa Majid:
Yeah, I think there is a growing interest. It’s difficult. Funding isn’t great. This work is challenging and time intensive. It’s much easier to run 12 experiments on your computer using Amazon Turk participants that have signed up to do that kind of thing. It’s a lot more difficult to collect 12 experiments in the field with people who have got their own day-to-day business to attend to and who have to be interested enough to give their time and volunteer to do something like this. Because it’s more time and labor-intensive, it can take longer to get results. And when everybody’s being compared, we’re hired by universities to produce papers.

Heather Min:
But what about psychologists and university professors in non-English locations throughout the world? Are they just not thinking about or teaching or studying psychology in the same way?

Asifa Majid:
I think that’s a real opportunity. I think there’s been a few things that have meant that perhaps we’re not able to enjoy the fruits of those possible different sites as well as we could. One has been because there’s been such a strong domination of the kind of English—Anglo context, that people who even have trained, let’s say, in the States and have gone back to academic jobs in China or Nigeria—they’ve applied the same paradigms in their new contexts.

They’re asking the same questions because they’re trying to be in communication with those places. And those are elite, and everybody wants to be part of that academic discourse. I think there was just an adoption of the same research questions, same methods.

I think now people are recognizing some of those differences. Let’s say you’re a researcher in Malaysia that’s been trained in the US. You go back. How are you going to conduct your experiment? Probably, with the undergraduates in your classroom who also have learned English and are probably drinking Coca-Cola and going watching American films.

Heather Min:
But still, it’s a different version of English, right?

Asifa Majid:
Yeah, it can be. It can be. I completely agree. I think there are questions to be asked in this context. And I think there are people that are doing that work now. There’s layers of issues, let’s say.

So one is, you’re an academic and you want to collect data. Who should you collect it from? Do you collect it from your undergraduates? How different are those undergraduates to an average American undergraduate? What’s the range of variation that we’re seeing there? And then can we take it out of the undergraduate population to capture diversity more broadly?

There are some amazing studies now, looking at how language is processed in the brain for speakers of different languages. We know for an English speaker, language is very strongly lateralized in the left side of the brain. But for Chinese Mandarin speakers, we find seem to find more bilateral activation.

Ivelisse Estrada:
I wanted to go back and ask about that—whether there are any collaborations happening with neuroscientists looking at what is happening in the brain.

Asifa Majid:
There’s lots of different avenues by which this is happening. There’s been fantastic work with sign languages, American Sign Language in the US—so, pioneering work by Karen Emmorey, for example.

There’s also shown some strong similarities in how language is processed between spoken and sign languages, but also some differences. I think we’re still unpacking what exactly that means. There’s definitely much more plasticity there and how language can be organized.

But still, the fact that we see recurrent structures turning up again and again, that there is this preference for the language system to be left lateralized—it’s trying to figure out what kind of system is this, that has preferences of being neurally instantiated in one way but still has the flexibility to reorganize if you have brain damage or something like that early in life. You can still be a completely fluent speaker without any apparent visible sign of anything going wrong.

Heather Min:
So it’s not necessarily that the left side of the brain is where the work of language happens. When you say Chinese speakers use both sides of the brain, what does that mean?

Asifa Majid:
Well, everybody uses both sides of the brain.

All:
[LAUGHTER]

Asifa Majid:
But there seems to be more asymmetry for English speakers than for Mandarin speakers, and it’s unclear why. Part of the reason could be because of the reading system, actually, not properties of the spoken language, per se. But English is an alphabetic writing system. We have letters for each of most of the sounds in English. We have this odd alphabetic system. It’s not completely regular. But OK. But in Chinese, you have a logographic system, where you have characters that are representing syllables. And also, it may be more iconic. These characters can capture images perhaps, and you’re having to learn them in a different way. So it could be, actually, the way that you’re processing these different writing systems is part of what’s going on.

But I think what—neuroscience is not my area—but what neuroscientists are trying to capture is, what’s the kind of decoding conditions? Which parts of the brain are preferentially being used to decode certain kinds of information? But I think just the observation that certain—again, it’s the kind of mapping question. What functions get mapped where? And is it necessary for it to happen in that way? And to answer that question, you need to look at the cross-linguistic diversity.

Heather Min:
So, what do we know at this point? You’ve shared with us all of the different speculations and the myriad of possibilities. And well, maybe it’s this, maybe it’s that. What can we say we can stand on, so that we can then lay on top of that the next phase of studies? Is there anything that anybody is really agreeing on, or is it all just controversial?

Asifa Majid:
Language is processed in the brain.

Ivelisse Estrada:
[LAUGHS]

Asifa Majid:
And culture is important in shaping language. From my perspective, the most exciting places to go next is to exploit their cross-linguistic and cross-cultural variation to figure out true universals. So I am also interested in capturing what is shared amongst people. And I believe the best way to do that is to take the extant cultural and linguistic diversity seriously. That’s where I think the money is.

Ivelisse Estrada:
The money.

Asifa Majid:
That doesn’t exist.

All:
[LAUGHTER]

Ivelisse Estrada:
I want to talk about this, because one thing that you’ve investigated is just how people describe sensory input, so smells. And the one about the smells is the one that stuck with me, because you found that one particular population had all these different categories for smells that don’t exist in many other languages. Why don’t people make up more words to describe things?

Asifa Majid:
We do a pretty good job of doing that. I think the American Dialect Society each year has a word of the year. They put together new things, terms that have popped up. People get to vote and what they think is the word of the year. And if you look at that—well, actually, 2020 was the word “COVID.” Before 2020, that was not anywhere, and then suddenly, it’s one of the most high-frequency words that you find in anywhere. So, we do coin new things.

If you look at perfumers, when they experience a new scent, they will often coin a term to remember it. But it’ll be idiosyncratic. One perfumer will describe it one way. and another another way. Because for them, they have to remember that scent, because they’re thinking about creating novel perfumes, let’s say. They have to remember this element or that element, how they’re going to combine. But they’re not necessarily communicating it to other people. So, my term for it might be completely different to yours, because I’m using it as a tool to help me remember and create.

But for a term, a novel term, to work communicatively, we have to agree what it means for that to do any job in communication. So that’s why, in the sensory industry, you have people that are trying to figure out, how do you communicate this scent, to now, there are people that are going to produce it, then the people that are going to market it, and then how ordinary people understand it.

You’ve got all these lines of trying to figure out how to make the communication work across different audiences. I think it’s not enough—you need to have the right contexts for a word to work. It’s got to be something that we’re experiencing or coordinating over that makes it relevant enough for us to develop a language game around it.

Ivelisse Estrada:
“Quit trying to make fetch happen.” [LAUGHS]

Heather Min:
Unless you’re a perfumer, apparently. So going back to Ivelisse’s question, though, you weren’t studying perfumers within the Jahai community, right? So why is it that they have so many words that describe nuances of odors that we don’t? I grew up in New York City, and the foul smell of dumpsters in August, I think, probably shut it all down.

All:
[LAUGHTER]

Heather Min:
But what’s going on with the Jahai when they’re not perfumers, but they’ve got so many words for—why?

Asifa Majid:
That was the question that I started with—why do the Jahai have all of these words? We can think about a few different factors that might have led to that. So one, they live in a very odorous environment. They live in tropical rainforest. There’s a lot of biological diversity, many different species of plants and animals. It’s humid, so volatiles are just much more salient. That’s one aspect. You have to compare the environmental factors.

They’re also hunter-gatherers. So you can imagine that it’s important to be able to orient. And again, because of the environment, its lush jungle, so your line of sight doesn’t go very far. Your cover is just green everywhere. So, actually, to get information from a distance, sound and smell are much more informative under some conditions. For the kind of hunting aspect and foraging aspect, it might be relevant.

But if we look at the specific cultural practices in that community, you see lots of ways that smell is being used. In medicine, the Jahai believed that certain smells can make you sick and others can cure it. So often, people will be wearing these really ugly ginger roots around their neck or on an amulet, because they believe that pleasant smell drives off illness, or they will, like, these kind of innocuous-looking flowers—not very beautiful, but they’re extremely scented—they’ll stick them in their hair. So, there’s a kind of medicinal use.

They also have a number of cultural taboos around smell. For example, if they do hunt game meat, there’s some kinds of game that you’re not allowed to cook on the same fire. So they’ll build two different fires to cook that food. A brother and sister shouldn’t sit too close. Their smells will mix, and that’s a kind of incest. There’s a number of different ways that smell organizes people’s lives.

Those are all kind of factors that make smell relevant. And then going back to what we were saying earlier, then if you are talking about how to organize yourself—you know, how to sit together, how to cook food, how to orient in this environment—smell’s one of the most important—at least as important as visual information in orienting to that environment. You can see these kind of boosting effects.

But over the years, I’ve switched, actually. I’ve started to think, why is it that English doesn’t have smell language? I mean, the thing is, we know from studies with Western participants that actually, our sense of smell is much better than we realize. We’re just not consciously aware of it. For the Jahai, it’s another level. They also are consciously aware of the role of smells.

Heather Min:
And perhaps all those words in their vocabulary—it’s a feedback loop, and it’s reinforcing their awareness of how nuanced and complex smells are.

Asifa Majid:
That’s beautifully put, that—yeah, exactly right.

Ivelisse Estrada:
I have one more question, though. Because we’re talking about this, and we’re realizing that language can open up these conceptual possibilities. Why wouldn’t we push more language instruction, more second- or third-language instruction in schools, when we know that it can broaden our understanding of the world and of each other?

Asifa Majid:
Some countries are doing this, and I think it’s great that they are. Scotland, for example, has a policy that children should learn up to three languages in school. The US is unusual in emphasizing monolingual education. And I think because English has become the language of science and policy and diplomacy, there’s an ease, perhaps, that goes along with that. But I think as world politics are changing and different factions are opening up, it becomes clear that you want to have access to other languages, so that you can get information, perhaps, that isn’t being just parceled to you through other actors.

I think there are cynical reasons to do it. But I mean, if you go to opera, I think your experience of that will be very much enhanced if you can understand Italian or German or—it gives you access to culture, which is ultimately, that’s what life is: learning about each other’s experiences and different ways of being.

Heather Min:
And that your reality isn’t the only reality. There’s more real there.

All:
[LAUGHTER]

Heather Min:
So, let’s say you had authority over what gets studied and which languages get the attention that they’ve not received to date. So English, Mandarin—all these already studied, overly studied languages aside—do you have any sort of sense of what the criteria should be to determine, well, we should shift the focus and our resources to that part of the world and these set of languages? Do you have any sense of which seem to be more urgent?

Asifa Majid:
Again, thinking about the scientific criteria, it’s most informative to look at languages that are the most different. A single study from a language that varies along a bunch of different dimensions can give us more initial information, at least. For example, rather than studying German as another language, because it’s so closely related to English, spoken by people that are historically speaking related languages and that culturally share many things—not that they’re the same, but that they share many things—it would be more interesting to go to a very different context.

You kind of want to go to a language that’s unrelated. So not from the same language family and probably spoken in a very different cultural context. Papua New Guinea, for example, has much more linguistic diversity, where any one of those languages could be interesting.

Places in South America could also be very interesting. Maybe you also just want to look at other sign languages going completely to different modality.

There’s plenty of opportunities. The many—the thousands of languages that haven’t been described yet would be great, but it has to be done in consideration of the local communities. You don’t want thousands of researchers going to one community of a few hundred people, and especially if the community doesn’t buy into what’s happening. It has to be done in conversation with the people to see if they want to participate in something like that.

But there’s no shortage. Of the 7,000 languages out there, we have only in-depth work on, really, a handful of them. Even big languages like Arabic, for example, have very few studies.

If you look at the language acquisition, where you think, well, that’s where researchers should really focus on linguistic diversity if we want to understand how children acquire language—we see that there’s more studies of Hebrew than there are of Arabic, even though Hebrew is a much smaller language. So, there are some languages that are spoken by very large communities that are still under-researched.

But I think from my perspective, looking at small-scale communities that are likely most different, like the Jahai, for example, that opened up these avenues of—smell was something that wasn’t important for humans and could never be part of language. Yet the Jahai showed us that is something that’s possible, and it opened up a whole range of questions that never would have been asked before. I think, out there, there’s these gems of languages that have possibility spaces that we can’t even conceive of yet, that could be opened up.

Heather Min:
This is, like, mind-blowing and expansive. As somebody who started out speaking Korean, and then we moved to America, and then I had to learn English if I wanted to go to school, and then talk to people, I have to say, I’m thankful that we have this one shared common language.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Thank you for sitting down with us and having this wide-ranging conversation.

Heather Min:
And I’m so excited about your work and look forward to how you put it all into shape.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Thank you for being so game.

Asifa Majid:
Thank you. Thank you both.

Heather Min:
Thank you.

Asifa Majid:
Thanks, everyone.

Heather Min:
The BornCurious podcast is brought to you by Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

Ivelisse Estrada:
Thanks for joining us. You can find BornCurious wherever you listen to podcasts. And to learn more about Harvard Radcliffe Institute—

Heather Min:
Visit radcliffe.harvard.edu.

[MUSIC]