Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

be an actual case of personification, not just an old relic.

Experiment at the Moscow Psychological Institute: Jakobson 1959a, 237, and Jakobson 1972, 108.

German and Spanish comparisons: Konishi 1993.

French and Spanish comparisons: Sera et al. 2002.

Italian nonsense words: Ervin 1962, 257.

Boroditsky and Schmidt’s memory experiment: Boroditsky et al. 2003, but detailed results of the experiment based on Boroditsky and Schmidt (unpublished).

9: RUSSIAN BLUES

page 217 Japanese traffic lights: Conlan 2005. The official Japanese standard for green traffic lights shown in figure 7 is taken from Janoff 1994, and from the Web site of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Lighting Research Center (http://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/transportation

/LED/LEDTrafficSignalComparison.asp). The official American standard is taken from Institute of Transportation Engineers 2005, 24.

Kay and Kempton’s experiment: Kay and Kempton 1984. More sophisticated experiments of this nature were carried out by Roberson et al. 2000, 2005.

Russian blues: Winawer et al. 2007.

The border between siniy and goluboy: This border (and for English speakers, the border between light and dark blue) was determined after the experiment for each participant separately. Each participant was shown twenty different shades of blue and asked to say whether each one was siniy or goluboy. English speakers were asked whether each shade was “light blue” or “dark blue.”

Left and right visual fields experiments: Gilbert et al. 2006. The results of this experiment inspired a spate of adaptations by different teams in different countries. See Drivonikou et al. 2007; Gilbert et al. 2008; and Roberson et al. 2008. All the subsequent tests corroborated the basic conclusions.

Broca’s area as a seat of language: Broca 1861. For a history, see Young 1970, 134-49.

MRI experiment: Tan et al. 2008.

EPILOGUE: FORGIVE US OUR IGNORANCES

Influence of language on thought can be considered significant only if it bears on genuine reasoning: See, e.g., Pinker 2007, 135.

APPENDIX: COLOR: IN THE EYE OF THE BEHOLDER

Color sensation in the brain: For further details on the anatomy of color vision, see Kaiser and Boynton 1996 and Valberg 2005.

“with only a little exaggeration”: Mollon 1995, 134. On the evolution of color vision, see also Mollon 1999 and Regan et al. 2001.

Memory affects perception of color: Hansen et al. 2006.

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