Chapter6 IS THE WORLD MADE UP OF NOUNS OR VERBS?

I've never imagined that language makes a difference to understanding of the world and the way of thinking! I was so surprised and impressed by Nisbett's ideas. His experiments were quite interesting and the results of these tests were even more interesting. Since I understand both Japanese and English, the part he wrote about Japanese and English languages were easy for me to understand. Even though he concludes that there is an effect of culture on thought independent of language, he says that the language probably plays a role in helping focus attention and in stabilizing the different orientations throughout life. By reading this chapter, I got very interested in language!

Well.. After reading chapter4, I started to wonder which nature or nurture causes the differences of Westerners and Easterners. I first thought nurture was more influential but in chapter4, there was a result of an experiment which showed that even infants had these differences. So I started to think that nature had some effect on these differences. However, by reading chapter6, I changed my mind again that nurture plays more important roles in causing them because there were so many examples in this chapter that showed the differences of Eastern and Western parents trying to educate their children. In his experiment, American mothers used much more object labels than Japanese mothers when playing with their children. Japanese mothers engaged more in social routines of teaching politeness norms. So they had differences even when they communicate with their little children. I think these differences made the differences of infants written in chapter4.