HOW GRAMMAR CHANGES PERCEPTION.

EYE movements; YOUNG adults; GRAMMAR; UNIVERSAL language; INDIGENOUS children

FEATURES PHOTOGRAPHS BY DAVID MAURICE SMITH IN THE EARLY 20TH century linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf thrilled his contemporaries by noting that the Hopi language, spoken by Native American people in what is now Arizona, had no words or grammatical elements to represent time. And more recently, many researchers have been troubled by the fact that most work on universal properties of language and language processing has been carried out using English and a few other familiar languages - a group that probably represents less than 5 percent of the world's language diversity. Recently Rachel Nordlinger, a linguist at the University of Melbourne who has studied Murrinhpatha for 18 years, and her colleagues conducted the first psycholinguistic experiment in the language. Nordlinger, who has been working with Murrinhpatha since 2005 but says she speaks it like a three-year-old, long suspected that understanding the demands the language puts on its learners could open windows on human thought. [Extracted from the article]