The Downsides of Language Optimization

I found this week’s readings, by Gary Lupyan and John Russell Rickford, to be fairly disparate. Lupyan discussed the ways in which language could affect a person’s representation of an object, such as a triangle, while Rickford highlighted injustices against the African American speech community as a result of the mechanisms of linguistic research and academia.

            I found Lupyan’s discussion on his triangle experiments suggested some sort of language priming effect in the human brain. It would appear that a “truly abstract” conception of a triangle does not exist and that humans generally have a preference as to which triangles are simply more “triangular” than others. Lupyan’s experiments demonstrated that the type of triangle drawn changed in response to the instruction to “draw a triangle” or “draw a three-sided polygon”. His results suggest that humans do not simply encode a “triangle” as “any three-sided polygon”, but in addition have a tendency to encode a base or “correct” example of a “triangle”. It is likely that by establishing this relationship between the word “triangle” and an initial conception of the object, we can more quickly think of the meaning of the word “triangle” when it is presented before us. I argue that the words “three-sided polygon” cause people to draw slightly different triangles because “three-sided polygon” does not possess the same inherent meaning as “triangle”. This phenomenon even though these two definitions are one in the same.

            We can take this concept one step further by generalizing that we create “proper” versions of many objects that we associate with words. For example, a particular animal may come to mind when one says “dog”, and yet another when one says “four-legged canine creature with fur and a tail”. It may be that we have existing images that come to mind for words such as “creature” and “canine”. When we try to layer these images in order to describe a “dog”, the resulting mental image is slightly different than what would have come about had we simply said “dog” in the first place. I am convinced that such behavior must have to do with some sort of optimization in the brain that allows for more speedy responses to words in every day speech. The drawback, and perhaps the bizarre part, is that we can influence a person’s conceptions based on the words we use and the ways in which we describe things. I think this is a phenomenon many people are aware of in the context of motivational or rally speeches, but it is interesting to draw similar conclusions from a formalized context such as Lupyan’s experiments.