You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

by Kate Murphy

Things get even more complicated when you try to communicate with someone who grew up speaking a different language from yours. Then you get into linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that a person’s native language influences how they see or experience the world. A clever study by South African and British researchers demonstrated linguistic relativity quite elegantly. They had Swedish and Spanish speakers estimate the amount of time that elapsed while watching two animations: one of a line increasing in length and another of a container filling from the bottom. Because Swedish speakers describe time using distance terms like long or short and Spanish speakers use volume-related terms like big or small, the Swedish speakers tended to think the line that grew longer took longer, when it actually took less time, while the Spanish speakers thought that the fuller vessel took longer to fill when, in fact, it didn’t.