The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from
Savings Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets

M. Keith Chen

Yale University, School of Management and Cowles Foundation

January, 2012

[mostly deleted]

6.1.1       Language, Attention, and Precision of Beliefs

Experimental research on the link between language and thought has focused
primarily on the relationship between language and two phenomena:
metaphors between space and time, and color perception. For example,
Tversky, Kugelmass, & Winter (1991) finds that English speakers spon
taneously organize time as moving from left to right while Hebrew speakers
organize time from right to left: both following the direction in which
their languages write.  

Even more interestingly, speakers of cardinal-direction languages (who
when facing North are obliged to refer to their left hand as their "west"
hand), spontaneously organize time as running from east to west
(Boroditsky & Gaby 2010). More closely related to my hypothesis are
several sets of findings that show that linguistically obligatory color
distinctions are correlated with precision of beliefs.

        Differences in how finely languages partition the color spectrum
are widespread; MacLaury (1992)  summarizes a large set of
cross-linguistic surveys which find that languages around the wold possess
anywhere from 2 to 11 "basic color terms".25 In one of the first studies
examining the cognitive correlates of these differences, Brown and
Lenneberg (1954) find that both English and Zuņi speakers have trouble
remembering nuanced differences in colors that are not easily definable by
their language.26 For example, Zuņi speakers (who classify green and blue
together) have trouble remembering nuanced differences between blue/green
colors. 

More recent studies have confirmed the direct role of language in these
findings. Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue
(goluboy) and dark blue (siniy).  Winawer et al. (2007) finds: Russian
speakers do better than English speakers in distinguishing blues when the
two colors span the goluboy /siniy border (but not when then do not), and
these differences are eliminated when subjects must simultaneously perform
a verbal (but not a spatial)  distractor task. Further implicating
language in this differential precision, Franklin et al. (2008)  finds
that this difference holds for adults, but not for pre-linguistic infants.
Similar correlations have been found between linguistic categorization and
spatial perception. Levinson (2003) summarizes a large literature which
studies the relationship between the way a languages express direction and
position, and the relative ease with which speakers can solve puzzles
requiring a particular spatial transformation. From Levinson:

[footnote: 2 4 Brown (1976) distinguishes the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:
"structural differences between language systems will, in general, be
paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences" from the strong: "The
structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or fully
determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the language". 2 5
MacLaury (1992) defines `basic color terms' as: "the simplest forms of
broadest meaning that most speakers of a language will routinely apply to
colors in any context". 2 6 The Zuņi (one of the Pueblo peoples), are a
Native-American tribe that live primarily in western New Mexico.]

"In a nutshell: there are human populations scattered around the world who
speak languages which have no conventional way to encode `left', `right',
`front', and `back' notions, as in `turn left', `behind the tree', and `to
the right of the rock'.  Instead, these peoples express all directions in
terms of cardinal directions, a bit like our `East', `West', etc. Careful
investigation of their non-linguistic coding for recall, recognition, and
inference, together with investigations of their deadreckoning abilities
and their on-line gesture during talk, shows that these people think the
way they speak, that is, they code for memory, inference, way-finding,
gesture and so on in `absolute' fixed coordinates, not `relative' or
egocentric ones."

Most notably, Boroditsky & Gaby (2010) find that cardinal-direction
language speakers do much better than English speakers when asked to point
which way `North' is. That is, speakers who are required to categorize
space in terms of cardinal direction, encode their current physical
orientation with much more precision. Also relevant to my hypothesis,
several papers have studied the question of how children acquire the
ability to speak about and conceptualize time. Harner (1981) finds that
among English-speaking children, the use of the future tense begins by age
3 and is relatively developed by age 5. Szagun (1978) finds that the
time-path of this development is identical in matched pairs of English and
German children, with these pairs of children showing no discernible
difference in the rate at which they acquire and use the future tense.
Since English is a strong-FTR language while German a weak-FTR language,
this suggests that differences between languages in FTR do not manifest in
early language acquisition. The FTR difference between English and German
is reflected in Szagun's study, but only among adults: the German-speaking
parents of the children Szagun studied used FTR much less often than their
English-speaking counterparts. While far from conclusive, this suggests
that the differences that I study between weak and strong-FTR languages do
not reflect either innate cognitive nor cultural differences between
speakers of different languages, at least as reflected in the development
of children through age five.

6.1.2      Scepticism of the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

While these studies have been taken to support the weak SWH, there are a
large number of scholars who argue that on balance, the idea that
cognition is shaped by language is misguided. Many of the most persuasive
arguments against a Whorfian interpretation of experimental data come from
linguists and anthropologists who subscribe to the Chomskyan school of
linguistics. In his seminal work Syntactic Structures (1957), Chomsky
argues that humans have an innate set of mechanisms for learning language,
and that this constrains all human languages to conform with a "universal
grammar". 

Taken in strong form, this implies that all languages share the same
underlying structure, which severely curtails the scope for differences in
language structure to affect cognition. In his book The Language Instinct
(1994), Pinker argues exactly this: that humans do not think in the
language we speak in, but rather in an innate "mentalese"  which precedes
natural language. He concludes that: "there is no scientific evidence that
languages dramatically shape their speakers' ways of thinking" (emphasis
mine). In an influential study, Berlin and Kay (1969) apply this type of
critique to the color-categorization studies I discuss above. 

They argue that differences in how languages divide the color spectrum do
not support the weak SWH, arguing that languages around the world share
many common color-naming tendencies, and that these tendencies map onto
human color-vision physiology. For example, Berlin and Kay note that all
languages have basic terms for `black' and `white', and if they have a
third it always contains `red'. While Berlin and Kay's universal theory of
color has needed to be revised in light of newly discovered languages
(MacLaury 1992), color-categorization support for the weak SWH remains an
hotly debated topic (see Wierzbicka 2008).

[18] Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic Structures. The Hague/Paris: Mouton.

[51] Pinker, Steven. 1994. The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates 
Language. New York:
William Morrow and Company.

[69] Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected 
Writings of Benjamin
Lee Whorf. ed. John B. Carroll. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.