Fascinating article in Discover magazine about how language affects mental facility.
New Nicaraguan sign language shows how language affects thought
It’s clear evidence that our spatial reasoning skills depend, to an extent, on consistent spatial language. If we lack the right words, our mental abilities are limited in a way that extra life experience can’t fully compensate for. Even 30 years of navigating through the world won’t do the trick. And they may never catch up, even though the language they invented has advanced – after all, some studies with American Sign Language suggest that people who learn spatial terms later on in life never master them.
[ source ]
(via BoingBoing)
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Posted in: Language
Posted on 27 June 2010
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