ABSTRACT
In 1964 Susan Ervin-Tripp (Ervin-Tripp, 1964) conducted an intriguing study on Japanese women who had married American soldiers after World War II. It involved a sentence completion task in which the women responded to open-ended questions. The interesting manipulation was that the women answered each question twice; once in English and once in Japanese. Here are some examples:
“When my wishes conflict with my family… J: It is a time of great unhappiness” A: I do what I want”
“I will probably become a… J: housewife” A: teacher”
“Real friends should… J: help each other” A: be very frank”
The fascinating aspect of these replies is that they are very different in content depending on which language is being spoken. The Japanese (J) responses reflect one cultural tradition and the American (A) responses another. The above study is not easy to interpret and the results may have arisen for a number of reasons, such as social conformity, but one possibility is that it illustrates how the language we speak can determine thought. We will return to this intriguing question later but, for now, we are concerned with more basic mechanisms of speech production.
