Alum Alex Carstensen uses Chichewa to study linguistics

We love to feature blog posts that highlight former volunteers' ongoing work in development and Malawi.

Alex Carstensen, a 2009 volunteer, is studying psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus on linguistics and cognition. Much of her research has included Chichewa speakers and the structure of the Chewa language, so we thought it would be great to share more with you about what she's up to! Some of the material is a little complex - but we've tried to break it down for the layperson (WC staff included!). It's really intriguing if you have even a bit of interest in the relationship between language and thought.

In a nutshell, Alex is looking into whether language shapes the way we think about space. Different languages vary in the amount of detail involved in spacial descriptions. Some languages are closer to
each other in this area while others are quite different. Do these words people use to explain space (say,
"over" or "on") shape the way we perceive the world? To some extent, yes, but Alex's research suggests that speakers of different languages may still think similarly, even when they talk about the world in different ways.

Alex sent World Camp the following abstract of some research she will be presenting this summer:

"Languages partition the world in different ways — for example, the categories named by spatial terms
vary substantially across languages. Yet beneath this linguistic variation there may lie universal
cognitive tendencies. Khetarpal et al. (2010) found that speakers of Dutch and English, despite
differences in their linguistic spatial systems, sorted spatial scenes similarly — and more like
the finer-grained language, Dutch. We asked whether this preference for fine-grained sorting extends
to two new languages: Máíhɨki, a language of Peruvian Amazonia, with a fine-grained spatial system,
and Chichewa, a Bantu language of southeast Africa, with a coarse-grained spatial system. Despite the
great range in spatial naming represented across these languages — both in the granularity and the shape
of their spatial categories — we found that speakers of all four languages sorted finely, and thus
similarly to the finer-grained languages, Máíhɨki and Dutch. These results suggest that spatial

cognition, unlike spatial language, is universally fine-grained."

Let's unpack that a bit!

Languages use different prepositions to explain the location of something. Perhaps in English we say
"around the neck" and "in a fishbowl" while a Chichewa speaker uses the same word for both locations.
In this case, English is the more "fine-grained" language because it's describes differences in location
more thoroughly.

When subjects were asked to group objects without using words, they grouped them in ways that were closer to the classifications of the finer-grained languages in the study. In fact, their non-verbal
classifications were even more fine-grained than any of the languages. This was true of subjects across languages.

This observation has led Alex and some of her fellow researchers toward the hypothesis that people think
about space with similar "granularity" regardless of the detail conveyed in their language.

Isn't that cool? And don't you feel a little bit smarter for working through those ideas? I think we
often wonder if people see the world in the same way that we do. This is some evidence that we might all be seeing the world in a similar way - at least spatially!