The relationship between language and thought, and assess one explanation of the relationship between language and thought

Loftus and palmer (1974) conducted research to find out to what extent recall is affected by the actual words used; they showed participants a film showing a car crash involving a number of cars. Participants were asked to describe what happened as if they were giving eyewitness testimony evidence. The participants were split in to groups of two and asked one of the conditions below: -

Condition 1: 'About how fast were the cars traveling when they smashed?'

Condition 2: 'About how fast were the cars traveling when they bumped?'

The results showed that the participants that were told 'smashed' thought that the cars were going faster than those who were told bumped. The way information is presented to a participant in the question showed it was systematically affected.

A further study was conduced a week later, when the participants were asked was there any broken glass at the accident?

Condition 1: 'smashed' -32% said they saw broken glass

Condition 2: 'bumped' - 14% said they saw broken glass.

Man thinking on a train journey.

English Language

atoms of thought

The addition of false details to a memory is called confabulation. The way information leads a person to say a certain bit of information is called a leading question.

Sapir ideas helped develop the linguistic relativity hypothesis which states that the form of language influences or determines the structure of our thought processes and affects the way we perceive the world, in 1940 whorf developed these ideas, he was influenced by the obvious difference among the worlds language, while whorf suggested that the language we use is directly responsible for shaping our thoughts of the world, sapir was more cautious, he saw language influencing rather than it determines thought.

These two versions became strong and weak, but soon increased to three from the work of Miller and McNeil (1969), it suggested...