Language Structure

The structure of a language forces us to attend to certain aspects of language, at the moment of using that language. It's known as the thinking for speaking hypothesis. There's evidence that language involves some kind of image simulation and that that has a consequence for how we perceive of certain events. Colour is quite a complex property of a visual world. Your brain is decoding colour in quite a complicated way. So you have many languages that have a term to denote both green and blue and typically we call this a grue term. You find this in languages like the Himba, for example, in the Namibian plains. In this experiment, we asked participants to look at the colour tile and then after 30 seconds we show them the full array of colours and we say, "Now, pick the one that you just saw." And it's a very difficult task if you're an English speaker but a Himba speaker can do it like child's play because that colour is central to them. You simply cannot recognize colours that are not easily encoded in your native language.