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Monday, August 15, 2011

You cannot see without a "frame" - or without a "word" for it

I found the following on the 12-Manage site recently. It said; "we have no choice but to put a frame on what and how we interact with our environment. Without a frame we would not know what to focus on and what to ignore." What an astounding and deep observation. This was discovered by a linguist called Lekoff.

That reminded me of the experiments by another linguist Noam Chomsky - who established relationship between cognitive growth and language -  who found that red Indian children - when shown videos of the flights of different birds - could "see" and identify differences in the flight of the birds because they had more words for movement of animals in their language - probably because traditionally they were hunters. The Caucasian children on the other hand  found less differences in the same videos - because the English language does not have many words for flight of words. Conclusion : You can "see" something more easily if you already have a "word" or a "frame" for it. No wonder there is as strong correlation between IQ and the number of words you know and can use.    

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