Developing distinctions between different categories of “love” in Japanese and English

Introduction:

Different languages approach the concept of love differently by using different vocabularies to describe and categorize it. In English, it is just as appropriate to “love your car” as it is to “love your husband”. Contrastingly, the Japanese language necessitates different words to express the distinct positive sentiments one would associate with a car, a spouse, or a family member. The distinction between the maternal love felt by a mother towards her son, and the romantic love shared by a married couple, is usually very clear to most adults, however, this distinction is not innate (For example, it is observable in everyday life that young children report wanting to “marry” a parent or a childhood friend, grouping the concepts of familial love, friendship and marital love into an all encompassing definition of love). At what age does the distinction become clear to children? Is there a relationship between the age at which a child begins to differentiate between different variations of love, and the vocabulary associated with the languages they speak? Could the language one speaks shape thought?

The Whorfian hypothesis postulates that language can influence the thought patterns of its speakers, causing them to organize thought and categorize concepts differently than speakers of another language (Kay & Kempton 1984). This study directly relates to the Whorfian hypothesis, as it assesses the impact of different vocabularies of love on the respective language’s speaker’s conceptualization of love.

A book called Language and Cognition: A Developmental Perspectives compiles past research on this topic, focusing on the developmental issues associated with language and cognition, and emphasizing the importance of answering the question “How do children acquire the conventional meanings of words?” (Dromi, 1993). The accuracy and speed with which children learn new vocabulary (45 words a week at some stages in language development (Dromi, 1993)) indicate that the method by which new words are linked with their conventional meanings is not a process of memorization. Several theories have been proposed to explain this incredible phenomenon.

Initially, Piaget, one of the forerunners in developmental psychology, hypothesized that a “general, all purpose, inductive mechanism” (Dromi, 1993) was the explanation for how children correctly associate categories and concepts with terms with such speed. They theorized that the process by which children learned a language involved three stages. In the first stage, the child experiences an example of a concept linked with a word, and in response create an initial hypothesis of which category or concept that word refers to. This is the process that Piaget referred to as assimilation, the translation of incoming information into a form that the child can understand. Next, the child would adjust this hypothesized definition of the word in reaction to supporting evidence that their initial concept of the word is correct, or evidence which went against their original hypothesis. Piaget called this second process accommodation, as the child was accommodating new information into their definitions of words and concepts. Finally, Piaget argued that the child would reach the third and final stage of language learning, called equilibration, in which the child balances assimilation and accommodation to create a stable understanding of the word and the associated concepts (S. Johnson, public presentation, October 24 2007).

This hypothesis answered important questions in relation to developmental psychology as well as the focus of this study, but unfortunately, there are several problems with this notion of an “inductive language mechanism”. Firstly, this hypothesis did not explain the accuracy and speed with which the meanings of words converge among all humans. Although children were learning novel words at and extremely fast rate, their supposed “hypothesized definitions” were extremely accurate. Furthermore, this inductive language learning mechanism was used by 2 years olds much more effectively than by 6 year olds, leading developmental psychologists to believe that there was some constraints on human language learning that biased children in their hypotheses towards certain categorizations and concepts (Dromi, 1993).

For this reason, a new school of thought, which posited that Children are constrained to consider certain types of concepts before others, came into existence. This new school built on Piagets’ perspectives on language development, but placed more emphasis on the manner by which children created their “initial hypotheses” of a novel word’s definition through constraints.

One example of a language learning constraint is the taxonomic assumption, which leads children to connect a single word with an object, rather than a relationship, or descriptor. It is through these assumptions that a child will deduce that when you point to a dog and say “dog”, you are referring to the dog, rather than one of the dogs qualities (“furry”) or actions (“barking”)(Dromi, 1993).

Another example of this category of constraint is called the whole-object assumption. This constraint biases children towards consideration of the whole object rather than a part of it, when defining categorizations. To relate this assumption to the previous example, when an adult makes reference to a “dog” the child will assume that the word “dog” is associated with the whole dog, rather than just a part of it (“tail”) (Dromi, 1993).

The final constraint put on novel words is referred to as “the mutual exclusivity assumption”. This is the assumption that a word’s meaning relates to only one concept or object. For example, as children learn new words, they will assume that when you say “chair” you are referring to the single chair, rather than the table and tablecloth that usually accompany the chair (Dromi, 1993).

All of these assumptions have important implications for the study of the linguistic development of the distinctions between different categories of “love”. After the English-speaking child’s initial exposure to the concept of “love”, for example, current understanding of these three constraints leads to the conclusion that the child will conceptualize “love” as a whole object, which doesn’t include any of its associated parts. This could cause the child to ignore important subtleties of the term as a descriptor of a relationship, or the importance of distinctions in associated people, for example husband and wife, mother and child, or boy friend and girlfriend. The Japanese speaker, on the other hand, might be at a developmental advantage because the Japanese language makes these distinctions through different words for each category of “love”.

One study by Guiora, Beit-Haachmi, Fried, and Yoder in 1983 demonstrated a direct relationship between the language environment and gender identity attainment. The study examined the average age at which three groups of participants from Israel, Finland, and the USA, respectively, developed gender identity. Speakers of a language which emphasized gender within its structure, attained gender identity earlier on average than speakers of languages which did not emphasize gender differences (Gioura, Beit-Hallahmi, Fried, Yoder, 1982). This study has important implications for the results of the study of the effect of linguistic background on the development of the concept of love, because it demonstrates the developmental effects that language can have.

Another study that addressed the idea of differing concepts of love, examined the distinction between the neural correlates of maternal and romantic love through the use of fMRI. In this study, Mothers were shown pictures of their children, then pictures of their best friends and acquaintances as the control. The results showed that

"Both types of attachment activated regions specific to each, as well as overlapping regions in the brain's reward system that coincide with areas rich in oxytocin and vasopressin receptors. Both deactivated a common set of regions associated with negative emotions, social judgment and ‘mentalizing’, that is, the assessment of other people's intentions and emotions. We conclude that human attachment employs a push–pull mechanism that overcomes social distance by deactivating networks used for critical social assessment and negative emotions, while it bonds individuals through the involvement of the reward circuitry, explaining the power of love to motivate and exhilarate."
(Bartels & Zaki, 2003)

Although there are also overlapping areas of the brain that are activated by both emotions, the difference in activated regions suggest that there is a difference between these two emotions (Bartels & Zaki, 2003). This research, however, does not touch on developmental aspects of the neural activity associated with the word love, or the affects of language on cognition.

One study that does demonstrate a relationship between language and cognition is a study that examined the relationship between mental representation of abstract concepts in the mind and the language one speaks. In the study, participants were shown a growing line on a computer screen, then either asked to estimate the amount of time that passed, or the change in length of the line. Participants whose language refers to time metaphorically as a “long” time (English and Indonesian speakers) usually estimated that more time had passed when a line grew a longer distance. Contrastingly, Spanish and Greek speakers, whose language generally refers to a volume or amount of time, for example, “mucho tiempo” (much time), did not experience this affect (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2007). This links between idiom and the conceptualization of abstract ideas, is indicative of the effect that language has on the conceptualization of abstract ideas.

Another recent study demonstrates the influence of language on perception. This research demonstrated that Russian language speakers are better at differentiating between dark and light blues than English speakers, due to the fact that the Russian language has words for dark and light blue (Winawer et al., 2007) From the results it can be concluded that language does have some affect on mental processes, however, language’s specific role in emotional development and the understanding of the concept of love is not evident in this study.

I predict that children who speak Japanese will be able to distinguish between the love felt between a mother and a son, a boyfriend and a girl friend, a husband and wife earlier in life than an English speaking child.

Method:

Participants: 200 American children who speak only English were tested, ranging in ages from 3 to 18,106 of which were girls, and the remaining 94 were boys. These children were invited to the study through advertising at day cares, day camps, and hospitals that offered 10$ for one hour of testing. 200 more Japanese and English speaking children were tested, ranging in ages from 3 to 17, 99 of which were girls, the remaining 101 were boys. These students were recruited from local Japanese American schools in the US. Finally, 200 more Japanese speakers from Japan were enlisted in the study, 120 of which were girls, and 80 of which were boys, and paid to participate. This group ranged in age from 4 to 18.

Procedures: There are four short children’s books that tell love stories that were translated into English and Japanese. The first story related the story of a mother and a child. The next told the story of two friends that love each other. The third was a story of a boyfriend and girlfriends that love each other, and the final story talked about a mother and father’s love for each other. These stories are extremely brief, and will the language appropriate word for love within the story (e.g. in the short story about the married couple they will say “I love you” or “aishiteru” at some point).

Each participant will be read all four short stories and then questioned afterwards in relation to the strength and type of love depicted in each short story. The Japanese monolinguals will be tested in Japanese, The American monolinguals will be tested in English, and the bilingual children will be randomly assigned to either be tested in English or Japanese.

Measures: The measures will be in the questions asked after the reading of the short children’s stories. Participants will be asked two questions: “Are the boyfriend’s feelings towards the girlfriend more intense than the Mom’s feelings toward her children?” and “Is the sentiment between the husband an wife different from the sentiment between the baby and the mom?” These questions are phrased so that in both languages they do no create framing effects that can prime children for a certain answer in either language. Next, participants will be asked to answer with certain set responses (For example, “The mom feels more strongly towards the child” or “The boyfriend feels more strongly towards the girlfriend” in response to the first question, and “different”, “same” in response to the second question) to make each response more comparable to the responses of other participants. The responses will be plotted and analyzed in order to see if there is a correlation between the language spoken by the children, and the age at which they begin to differentiate between different types of love.

Discussion:

If the results show a younger average age of attainment of the distinction between different categories of “love” for Japanese speakers than English speaking children, then the results would support the original hypothesis that word distinctions between categories of love facilitate the development of conceptual distinctions.

There are several possibilities that could support my hypothesis, but would have different implications, however. One possibility would be if the data were to show a statistically significant difference between the ages at which bilingual children attain this ability when tested in English versus Japanese (Fore example, participants tested in Japanese might pass at an earlier age on average than participants tested in English). This would lead to the conclusion that there is some priming effect due to testing language. It is possible that the difference in average ages of acquisition is due to the fact that the language that the story is told in emphasizes the difference in the type of love, because different vocabularies utilized during the stories, priming the children to answer that there is a difference in Japanese and priming the children to answer that there is no difference in English. If this were to be the case, the data could not support the hypothesis that there is a permanent change in cognition due to the language that a child speaks, but rather that language can implicitly cause a child to answer the question in a certain way, and create priming effects.

If however, the bilingual children are statistically better at distinguishing between different types of “love” than the monolingual English-speaking children, the data would support the hypothesis that language does have some affect on the development and conceptualization of distinctions within the concepts of “love”.

One of the strengths of this study’s experimental design is rhetoric of the questions, making framing effects less likely to alter the participant’s response. If the participants that were tested in Japanese were asked a translation of the corresponding English question “Does the boyfriend’s “love” towards the girlfriend more intense than the Mom’s “love” toward her children?”, questioners would be compelled to use two different words in place of the English word “love”, one for romantic love between a boyfriend and girlfriend and one for maternal love. This framing of the question in Japanese would most likely cause framing effects, leading to children to respond that in fact there is a difference, due to the fact that two different words were use to describe each type of love.

One weakness of the study is that there are many possible confounds. One possible confound is the fact that although the questions are formed in order to avoid framing effects, the Japanese translation of the mother/child, boyfriend/girlfriend, and Husband/wife stories must use different vocabulary, where as the English translations would not, possibly priming the Japanese children to make a distinction between the different types of love.

Recommendations for future research: As discussed in the previous section, the language utilized within each story could prime the study’s participants for certain response to the questions. To diminish this confound in future studies, it may be better to test the children through different techniques. One way this could be accomplished would be to show the children pictures of the corresponding relationships instead of telling them stories.

Another interesting study could broaden the scope of included languages. Greek, which also makes several distinctions among categories of love, as well as spanish, which also makes distinctions, but to a lesser extent, could be compared to Japanese.

References:

Winawer, J., Witthoft, N., Frank, M.C., Wu, L., Wade, A. R., and Boroditsky, L. (2007) Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104, 7780-7785.

Bartels, A. and Zaki, S. (2003). The neural correlates of maternal and romantic love. NeuroImage, 21, 1155-1166.

Kay, P. and Kempton, W. (1984). What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis? American Anthropologist, 86, 65-79.

Casasanto, D., and Boroditsky, L. (2007). Time in the mind: Using space to think about time. Retrieved November 14, 2007, from http://www.psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/duration-cognition-2007.pdf

Dromi, E. (Ed.). (1993). Language and Cognition: A Developmental Perspective. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex Publishing Corporation.

Gioura, A. Z., Beit-Hallahmi, B., Fried, R., & Yoder, C. (1982). Language environment and gender identity attainment. Language Learning, 32, RetrievedDecember 11, 2007, from http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-1770.1982.tb00973.x.