Cheng Zhong Su wrote:
>
> Maarten wrote: >
> > Why does word length has anything to do with
> > thinking speed?
> Answer:I think this paragraph from linguistic encyclopedia will help you
understand what is thinking speed.
Well, I think I know that already. Unless you use a common term to mean
something else than what it obviously means.
> P4612FgCodability is a concept that has appealed to many experimental
psychologists working on
> short-term memory: the quantity of material individuals are capable of
retaining accurately in
> short-term memory is limited, and different encodings of the same
information can differ in how readily they
> can be esqueezed in.f An early demonstration of this was by S.Smith
(cited in Miller 1956), who trained
> subjects to recode a list of binary digits (0s and 1s) into octal (the 0
to 7), so 000 is record as 1, 010 as
> 2, etc. Subjects so trained were able to recall accurately much longer
sequences of binary digits than
> subjects who had not received this training. Such a result points to one
important general function
> of language in thought: recording material in a compact form enables us to
retain more of it in
> short-term memory, and any thought processes that depend on manipulation
of such material should
> benefit. The details of this idea have been worked out more fully
recently: eworking memoryf is the
> preferred term for manipulations of material on a short-term basis, and it
has been established that
> immediate recall of verbal material is heavily dependent on the operations
of an earticulatory
> loopf in working memory, whose capacity is limited by how much the
subject can say in 1.5-2seconds. If the
> material takes longer than 2 seconds to say (because it contains many
syllables or because the subject is
> not an agile articulator) then it will not always be accurately recalled
(for a good review, see Baddeley 1986).
Interesting, but this is only soemwhat related to what yo are arguing. It
basically says that it is easier to remember short words than longer words,
generally speaking. But it does not say:
- that this makes you think any faster
- that if you have a bigger set of items to remember from, you might not
also decrease the chance for accurately recalling something.
I.e. if you add four tones to an existing languages, it enables you to make
shorter words, which can be remembered more reliably, but who is to say that
because you have more different syllables to choose from, the chance for
recalling on of them correctly doesn't become smaller?
Maarten