Introduction
People’s perceptions of various things may be different, but maybe similar if they live in one society. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis explains that the structure of a language partly determines a native speaker’s categorization of experience” (Joseph, 2002, p. 72). The idea of this hypothesis is that people of different cultures and as a result the speakers of different languages think and behave differently. This hypothesis is easy to illustrate with the example. British people have eight colors and the Berinmo only five (brown, orange, yellow and green are named as “wor”). British people easily distinguish between these colors while the Berinmo had difficulties with discriminating some colors which are in the “wor” group. This shows that different language peculiarities have influence on people’s world perception.
The same deals with the sounds. Considering the sounds people also distinguish between “ba” and “pa”, without paying attention to the intermediate sounds, they just use the dominated one for characterizing. The aim of the experiment is to show on the example of sounds that people of one society think similar and consider similar problems equally.
Methodology
The methodology of the experiment includes the computer usage and interpretation of the information. The idea is that the students were given individual computers with the headphones. Then the sounds were given and the student’s task was to identify whether it was “ba” sound (short voice onset time) and “pa” sound (long voice onset time). There were ten trials for each stimulus, for a total of ninety trials. The further work was given to the computer. The system delivers the class experiment results with the link to the personal one. The students are given an opportunity to repeat the try if the sound, which was heard, was not understandable. The system repeated the sound later. The results of the experiment should show that different people, hearing one and the same sounds, equally consider them either short voice onset time or long voice onset time, this is going to prove that people’s minds work in the similar directions and that the associations of the people who live in one and the same society are similar.
Summary of group results
The result, which is shown in the average results of the class show the number of times each speech token was identified as “ba”. 16 participants took part in the experiment. The first token was considered as “ba” by 9.31 out of 10, and the last token was heard as “ba” by 1.25. These results show that different people who hear the same sounds consider them as almost the same according to their sounding. The table with the deviation shows the rate of people who answered the opposite variant. The results show that in the middle of the experiment, where the more difficult was to distinguish between “pa” and “ba” tokens, more students were confused about which variant to choose.
Summary of individual results
The individual results show the answers which were provided by one student (in this case it is my results). The first table “data summary” shows how the student (I am) responded and how these responses were similar to the true variant (the rate shows the clicks on the “ba” button). That is where the 10.0 rate so, my responses were “ba” all the time, where the lower rate (in this case it varies from 9.0 to 1.0), so the confidence was that “pa” sounds were heard. Trial-by-trial data showed the number of opportunities that were used to distinguish between “pa” and “ba” sounds.
Table 1. Average experiment results for class: 2385_summer09
Data summary: Averages across participants
Table 2. Standard deviations across participants
Table 3. Personal Experiment Results
Data summary
Table 4. Trial-by-trial data
Reference List
Joseph, J. E. (2002). From Whitney to Chomsky: essays in the history of American linguistics John Benjamins Publishing Company