Referential relativity: Culture-boundedness of analytic and metaphoric communication

Cognition, 5 (1977) 215 - 233 @Elsevier Sequoia S.A., Lausanne

2 - Printed

in the Netherlands

Culture-boundedness

Referential relativity: of analytic and metaphoric communication * t W. PATRICK University

NAOMI University

DICKSON

of Wisconsin

MIYAKE

and

TAKASHI

MUTO

of Tokyo

Abstract Japanese college students were presented an array of 16 abstract referents and asked to describe each figure so that another student could correctly identify it in the arra.y. Each referent was described twice.. once in a metaphoric and once in an analytic mode. A test set of 64 of the descriptions was translated into English. Two groups of Japanese college students responded to the Japanese version and two groups of American college students responded to the English version. The students were asked to choose the referent in the set of the 16 which each description best fit. The two Japanese groups showed highly similar patterns of response to the descriptions, as did the two American groups, but comparisons between the two cultures revealed very different patterns of response. Both metaphoric descriptions and analytic descriptions produced different patterns of response in the two cultures. These results are interpreted as evidence of ‘referential relativism’, which is the effect of language and culture upon referential meaning. The use of referential communication tasks to measure the culture-boundedness of communication is discussed.

*The fist author wishes to thank the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science which provided the grant under which he was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Tokyo during 1974 - 75, and Dr. Hiroshi Azuma who sponsored his visit. This study is one of several carried out by members of a collaborative workshop for research on communication skills which met during this time. Members of the workshop included, in addition to the authors, Giyoo Hatano, Yoshio Miyake, Yuriko Oshima, Naomi Sakata, and Naoki Ueno. All members of the workshop were active in designing and carrying out this experiment. The workshop was an intellectually stimulating experience for all participants. Thanks also go to M. J. Subkoviak for suggestions concerning data analysis. Requests for reprints should be sent to W. Patrick Dickson, Child and Family Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wisconsin 53706. +We wish to thank R. M. Krauss for furnishing the complete set of abstract figures from which the 16 figures were selected.

216 W. Patrick

Dickson,

Naomi Miyake

ard

Takashi Muto

This is a study of the effects of language and culture on referential communication. Three points are made in this introduction. First, recent work demonstrating considerable universality in the perception, memory, and naming of color does not preclude the possibility of linguistic and cultural effects in other domains. Second, effects of language and culture on thought within culture bear no necessary relationship to effects of language and culture on communication between cultures. Third, referential communication tasks with translated messages may be used to study the effects of language and culture on communication. Brown (1976) has given a lively account of one line of research on the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis in the color domain. He concludes his review by saying, “The fascinating irony of this research is that it began in a spirit of strong relativism and linguistic determinism and has now come to a position of cultural universalism and linguistic insignificance” (p. 152). But this conclusion is based primarily upon research on color, and “far from being a domain well suited to the study of the effects of language on thought, the color space would seem to be a prime example of the influence of underlying perceptual-cognitive factors on the formation and reference of linguistic categories” (Heider, 1972, p. 20). Given the diverse interpretations placed upon the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, it is important that the reader understand that this paper is primarily concerned with the effects of language upon communication. Whether the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis was meant to apply directly to communication is subject to conflicting opinions, even between the foreword and introduction to the collection of Whorf’s (1956) writings. In the foreword Stuart Chase states that Wharf “flatly challenges” the view that “a line of thought expressed in any language could be translated without loss of meaning into any other language” (p. vii). A few pages later in the introduction, John Carroll gives a different interpretation: “Surely, at any rate, it would have been farthest from Wharfs wishes to condone any easy appeal to linguistic relativity as a rationalization for a failure of communication between cultures or between nations” (p. 27). Whatever the “true” interpretation of the intention of Benjamin Whorf, suffice here to say that his writings have had considerable influence upon research concerned with the question of possible effects of linguistic relativity upon communication. In absolute form this question may be phrased, “Can we never really understand or communicate with speakers of a language quite different from our own because each language has molded the thought of its people into mutually incomprehensible world views?” (Rosch, 1974). Of course, almost no one (including Rosch) really expected such an absolute effect. Indeed, such all-or-none phrasing may divert us from the

Referential Relativity 217

more researchable question: To what extent and in which domains is communication between cultures likely to be inaccurate or inefficient? Anything which can be expressed in one language probably can be expressed in another language, at least for referential expressions, but “what is expressed easily, rapidly, briefly, uniformly, perhaps obligatorily in one language may be expressed in another only by lengthy constructions that vary from one person to another, take time to put together, and are certainly not obligatory” (Brown, 1976, p. 129). The assumption that different world views would preclude accurate communication between those world views deserves challenge. Although differences in language or thinking increase the probability of miscommunication, effects of language on thought bear no necessary relationship to effects of language on communication. Two cultures (or individuals) may have different world views (or more narrowly, different referential meanings for given expressions), yet be able to communicate accurately. Conversely, identical world views will not be mutually comprehensible in the absence of communication systems to map them onto each other. An awareness of the lack of congruence in meanings is an essential prerequisite for the development of exact systems of translation, and one motivation for research on linguistic relativity is the desire to expose such incongruence. But if the color domain has not revealed substantial effects of language on the “formation and reference of linguistic categories,” what domains might be more sensitive? In the referential domain (that is, things which can be pointed at), two hypotheses may be put forth. First, cultural and linguistic effects are more likely with referents which are cultural artifacts such as symbols, tools, and pictorial representations (Arnheim, 1969). Second, such effects are more likely with referents which are informationally complex (Garner, 1962) because, if for no other reason, little variance in referential performance may be expected with simple referents. The trick, from an experimental standpoint, is to find referents which are not culture bound and look for differences in referential meaning when linguistic tools which do not appear on the surface to be culture bound are deployed upon them in a referential communication situation. Abstract line drawings have this property of being culture-free referents because they are novel in all cultures, and a cross-cultural adaptation of referential communication tasks provides a way of obtaining language samples which appear culture free. Referential communication tasks require one person to describe a referent (object, symbol, or behavior) such that another person will be able to select that referent from the set of possible referents. Referents have ranged from pictures with readily named characteristics (Shantz & Wilson, 1972) to

2 18 W. Patrick Dickson, Naomi Miyakc and Takashi Muto

abstract referents (Krauss & Glucksberg, 1969; Dickson, 1974; Dickson, Nagano, Miyake, & Oshima, 1976). These tasks have the advantage of making meaning overt in terms of the response of the listener. Research on referential communication has been recently reviewed by Glucksberg, Krauss, and Higgins (1975). This method may be adapted for research on communication between cultures. If a description of a particular referent in an array of referents is produced in one language and translated literally into another language, then the responses of a sample of listeners in the two cultures can be compared. (In simplest form, the proportion of listeners choosing the intended referent would be compared.) Where the pattern of responses produced was significantly different, this might be taken as evidence of “referential relativity”, which is the effect of language and culture upon referential meaning. Fundamental to this approach is the definition of “literal” translation. Obviously, translation of some kind is essential for communication between different languages. A literal translation is one which seeks to maintain oneto-one correspondence in the translation of information bearing words, while permitting those changes in word order and syntax necessary to make the translation conform to the grammatical requirements of the language. It is important to emphasize that this definition of literal translation has a quite different purpose than the more usual attempt at finding “translation equivalent” expressions (Osgood, May, and Miron, 1975, p. 15). Rather than seeking translation which is referentially equivalent, the use of literal translation is directed toward a prior issue: the identification of messages requiring non-literal translation in order to produce equivalent responses in the original and translated forms. More specifically, this approach is an attempt to measure how much messages which appear to use a translationally identical lexicon differ in referential meaning. The degree to which a given referential message is “culture bound” may then be quantified in terms of the extent to which a literal translation of the message produces a significantly different proportion of intended responses in one culture than the original message produced in the culture of origin, controlling statistically for overall performance. The need to control for overall performance results from recognition that different cultures cannot be easily compared on overall measures. This problem can be circumvented by abandoning “research designs whose emphasis is ‘main effects’ of culture per se” (Rosch, 1974, p. 107). Therefore, this approach uses a large set of translated messages within which to look for specific messages which are culture bound, regardless of overall level of performance in the two cultures. The degree to which messages are culture bound may depend upon the style of encoding. Two commonly used styles of encoding are metaphoric

Referential Relativity 219

and analytic (Heider, 1971; Werner & Kaplan, 1964). Metaphoric descriptions tend to be holistic and inferential and refer by saying what the refeuse technical descriptions of the rent “looks like”. Analytic descriptions parts of a figure such as “it has points at the top and a straight line at the bottom.” Metaphoric messages, drawing on the concrete experience of individuals, might be expected to be more culture bound, while analytic messages might be expected to be more universal. In the present study a set of analytic and metaphoric messages are translated from Japanese into English and presented to two groups of listeners in each culture. The patterns of response within and between cultures are examined with a view to identifying specific messages which appear culture bound.

Method Materials

As a part of another experiment, 16 abstract figures (Figure 1) originally used by Krauss and Weinheimer (1966) were presented to 32 college students in Japan. The students were asked to write a description of each of the 16 figures “so that another student would be able to choose the one you describe”. The students described each figure in two modes: ‘analytic’ and ‘metaphoric’. In the analytic mode the figures were described in such terms descriptions as ‘lines’, ‘points’, ‘curves’, and so on. The metaphoric characterized the figures in terms of what the figures ‘looked like’. The 1024 messages generated by this procedure were then decoded by 20 different Japanese college students, each description being decoded by 5 students. Based upon these decodings, each description could be given an effectiveness score of from 0 to 5 according to how many of the decoders successfully identified the intended referent. From the pool of 1024 messages a set of 64 descriptions (2 analytic and 2 metaphoric for each referent) was selected so as to form a test composed of messages which had been decoded correctly, on average, by approximately 50 percent of the decoders, an optimal level of difficulty for a sensitive test of decoding performance (Dickson, 1976). These 64 descriptions were translated into English on the basis of careful discussions among several Japanese fluent in English and the American author. The goal was a literal translation, especially avoiding the addition of information. In some cases this was straight-forward as in the message translated as “A shutter of a camera”. Other descriptions were more difficult to translate for several reasons. First, the descriptions were deliberately selected on the basis of having been difficult to decode accurately in Japanese. Conse-

220 W. Patrick Dickson, Naomi Miyake and Takashi Muto

Figure 1.

Abstract figures referent set.

many of the messages were ambiguous and incomplete in Japanese. Second, the Japanese language does not use plurals and articles, although a Japanese listener can frequently infer implicit plurals and articles from the context. In order to avoid unnatural English, articles and plurals were added where implied in the Japanese. For example, the literal “two circle on top” was translated as “two circles on the top”. The 64 descriptions were then used to prepare a Japanese and English version of the test booklet (Dickson, Miyake, & Muto, 1975). quently,

Subjects

A total of 150 students from four colleges, two in Japan and two in the U.S., served as subjects. The two Japanese colleges are located in the Tokyo

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Relativity

221

metropolitan area (43 and 67 students), and the two American universities are in California and Wisconsin (20 students each). These students were given the test booklet in their native language and asked to record on an answer sheet which of the 16 figures they thought each of the 64 messages described best. The task required about 40 minutes to complete.

Results

The results will be presented in three sections: overall between-country comparisons, item analysis, and examination of selected items showing culture-boundedness. Ovrrull betwectl-country

compurisons

The overall performance of the groups in the two countries is not a central issue in this paper. We need to examine the overall level of performance only to consider whether it is similar enough to justify a more detailed examination of individual items. If an overall difference in level of performance is found between the two countries, then we must control for this difference before looking at differences on individual items. We are, however, interested in the predicted interaction of type of description (analytic versus metaphoric) with culture. Performance was scored according to whether the decoder chose the referent intended by the encoder: an intended response was scored as 1 and other responses as 0. Summing across items, the overall performance could range from 0 to 64, while performance on the two types of descriptions could range from 0 to 32. The mean scores for Japan and the U.S. respectively were: overall (34.47 and 32.40), analytic messages (17.79 and 17.42), and metaphoric messages (16.68 and 14.98). Analysis of variance for country with type of message as a repeated measure showed an overall tendency for messages to be decoded as intended more often in their original Japanese, F( 1,148) = 6.55, p < 0.00 1. Although not a central concern of the study, the similarity of overall level of performance suggests that the overall informational content is roughly equivalent. One might have expected rather substantial differences between the two language versions, insofar as difficult messages regarding abstract figures were translated with the conscious attempt to avoid adapting the messages. The similarity of the effectiveness of the messages suggests an underlying similarity of the information processing requirements in the two cultures. Analytic messages were decoded more accurately than metaphoric, but no significance should be attached to this result because the messages were not

222 W. Patrick Dickson, Naomi MiJ)ake and Takashi Muto

sampled randomly from the larger pool of 1024. Some evidence of the predicted interaction of message type with culture was found: Compared to analytic messages, metaphoric messages were somewhat more likely to be decoded in the culture of origin than in translation, F( 1,148) = 3.39, p < 0.07. Item

atlall*sis

Independent of the question of overall performance is the question of culture-boundedness of individual messages. Are some messages more accurately decoded in one culture than another? One way to examine this question has been described by Angoff and Ford (1973). Basically, one correlates the proportion of subjects choosing the intended response for each item in two groups. (Angoff and Ford used an adjusted score which was not used here.) These proportions can range from 0.0 to 1.0. If the two groups are responding similarly to each item, then the correlation of these item scores should be high. If not, the correlation should be low. The correlation is 0.93 between the two Japanese samples and 0.91 between the two American samples, indicating that the two groups within each country are responding quite similarly to the 64 referential messages. The scatterplot for the two Japanese samples is shown in Figure 2. The scatterplot for the two American samples (not shown) is virtually indistinguishable from Figure 2. A very different result is produced when we plot the proportions of intended responses for the combined groups in each country (Figure 3). The contrast between Figure 2 and Figure 3 is striking evidence that these referential messages are eliciting different responses in the two cultures. The dispersion of points in Figure 3 is the visual representation of the loss of meaning in translation. The correlation for Figure 3 is only .75. Items lying furthest from the best fitting line for Figure 3 are items with the greatest degree of culture-boundedness. Before proceeding to examine individual messages, we should discuss one possible explanation for the apparent referential relativism displayed in Figure 3 which might be thought to reflect simply a lack of fidelity in translation. Although translator should be included as a factor in an ideal experimental design, translation does not appear to account for the present results. During the initial translation of the messages, two independent translations were prepared. The two translations were so similar that the expense of including both forms seemed unwarranted. Further, those items which were found to show strong evidence of referential relativism were translated by a third translator. Again, the translations were almost identical: “a shutter of a camera” is “a shutter of a camera.”

Referential Relativity 223

Figure 2.

Plot of 64 items on proportion of intended responses in two Japanese samples.

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In order to identify those messages which differed significantly between cultures, controlling for overall performance, the following procedure was used. First, the mean proportion of intended responses for each item for each individual was subtracted from each item, yielding a within-person deviation score. Betweencountry t tests were then performed on these deviation scores for each item. Those items found to differ between the two countries at the .Ol level were considered to show evidence of culture-boundedness. In effect this approach identifies those items in Figure 3 which lie furthest off the best fitting line.

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Figure 3.

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A total of 15 of the 64 descriptions, 7 analytic and 8 metaphoric, were found to be culture bound according to this criterion. In contrast, the same test, applied to the within-country comparisons showed only 1 description out of 64 to differ significantly between within-country groups - exactly what would be expected by chance. At this point we would ask the reader to look again at Figure 1 and choose which referent looks like “the upper part of a rose looked down on.” Also find “the shutter of a camera”. You may compare your responses with those presented in Table 1 for the culture bound messages. Beside each message is the intended referent and the percent choosing this response.

Referential Relativity 225

Other responses chosen by more than 5 percent of the students are also shown. “The upper part of a rose looked down on” was seen most often as referent 3 in the U.S. and referent 5 in Japan. Choices other than 3 or 5 were infrequent in either culture. For some of the messages a plausible explanation comes readily to mind. Many Japanese children wear uniforms with “school badges” on them and the “abacus” is more common in Japan. Similarly, a “small wine cup” (or sake cup) has a shape peculiar to Japan. Not surprisingly, these examples of what might be called “obviously” culture-bound descriptions elicit more accurate responses in Japan than in the U.S. Less readily explained is the fact that “a shutter of a camera” is responded to more accurately in the U.S. than in Japan. Cameras in the U.S. look remarkably similar to Japanese cameras, frequently down to the brand name. Nor is it easy to understand why an environmental universal such as a “broken egg shell” would evoke different metaphoric associations in the two cultures. Post hoc discussions have suggested plausible explanations for some of these “subtly” culturebound descriptions. In the U.S. soft boiled eggs are sometimes eaten in egg cups so that broken egg shells may be seen in the upright position more often there. In contrast, boiled eggs are usually peeled and eaten by hand in Japan in such a way that an upright, intact half of an egg shell may be less often seen. Similarly, the archetypical “stomach” in the U.S. may be strongly influenced by an often repeated television advertisement for a headache medicine, though it is arguable which came first, the advertisement or the “stomach”. The occurrence of large differences in response patterns to the analytic messages shown in Table 2 is more puzzling. Some of these differences may result from changes in translation due to the addition of articles and plurals in the English version. For example, “a crooked triangle whose bottom part is missing” unambiguously refers to one triangle, whereas the original Japanese could refer to a number of triangles because articles and plurals are not normally used in Japanese. The fact that many Japanese chose referent five with its three incomplete triangles supports this interpretation. It is doubtful however that all of the differences may be explained this way. Perhaps the archetypical “triangle” or “curved line” is different in the two cultures, but further research is clearly needed. The most important point to make about these observed differences, however, is not that they cannot be explained post hoc, but rather that many of them could not be readily predicted a priori, even by individuals with considerable experience in both cultures. Many models of referential communication performance include an editing phase during which a speaker considers the probable responses of the listener to a potential message before

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Response patterns to analytic messages which dijrer significantIll between Japan and the U.S.

English Translation

Country

Three things whose heads are round each stick out.

U.S. Japan

1 (88) 1 (63)

9 (20)

16 (IO)

It is symmetrical and curved lines are drawn upward from both bottom ends.

U.S. Japan

2 (40) 2 (21)

8 (30) 8 (32)

14 (13)

7 (8)

7 (15)

14 (13)

Nearly a regular triangle and three shapes are identical and the bottom of each triangle has no line.

U.S. Japan

5 (88) 5 (36)

7 (8) 1 (58)

It is symmetrical. The top part is somewhat round. The bottom part has convexes on its left and right.

U.S. Japan

8 (40) 8 (79)

6 (38) 2 (8)

1(10) 6 (6)

2 (8)

A crooked is missing.

U.S. Japan

10 (73) 10 (19)

7 (13) 5 (40)

16 (8) 7 (34)

From top to bottom there are two halfcircles. The lower part is a straight line and cut.

U.S. Japan

14 (43) 14 (85)

4 (18)

16 (18)

8 (JO)

9 (8)

There are two things sticking out loosely on the left and right sides on the top and there is a thing sticking out loosely on the bottom.

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4 (15) 8 (28)

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deciding to speak it (Flavell, Botkin, Fry, Wright, & Jarvis, 1968; Glucksberg et al., 1975). The different response patterns produced by these messages (both within and between countries) make it seem unlikely that speakers could accurately assess the probable responses of a group of listeners to messages such as these.

Discussion Some literally translated referential messages mean different things in different cultures. “A rose” is not “a rose”, at least when “looked down on”. The lexical equivalents appearing in two-language dictionaries do not

228

W. Patrick Dickson, Naomi Mi)~akc ami Takashi Muto

map identically onto each other. “A shutter of a camera” does not call forth the same associations in two cultures in which cameras are common. For some messages the explanation is obvious, for others subtle or unknown. How may these results be related to the findings of linguistic insignificance in the domain of colors? First, referential relativism deals with communication rather than thought. The present technique provides a rather precise way of studying this influence. Communicability scores, in addition to the theoretical advantages discussed by Brown (1976, p. 14.5), are more reliable measures on purely psychometric grounds than measures based upon responses of single individuals. Second, this study uses complex abstract line drawings for referents in contrast to color and simple geometric forms often used. One would predict greater influence of culture upon those domains which are cultural products, where lexical differentiation would appear to be strongly influenced by culture. Not only do cultures exist in natural worlds which differ, but also they increasingly modify those natural worlds in culturally determined ways, especially by means of the visual media (Arnheim, 1969). Third, the language being mapped onto these abstract line drawings is more complex in some sense than is the language of color names. Metaphoric descriptions do not relate to the abstract referents along fixed dimensions the way color names relate to the color space. Analytic descriptions call for the application of a sort of mental tracing which appears also to differ from color naming. These sets seem even fuzzier than has been dreamt of in fuzzyset theory (Anglin, 1977, p. 7). An analogy may be drawn to the distinction between computer hardware and software. Research on color perception (to mention only one area) has well established that human beings around the world have much the same “hardware”: Our eyes and brains seem to be wired up identically. Similarly, this research tends to support the view that the “software” of color naming does not substantially influence such hardware functions as perception. But it may be going too far to conclude that such research demonstrates linguisic insignificance. The software of a culture (lexical and algorithmic), at the very least, influences the efficiency with which members of culture can communicate in different domains. And cognitive processes such as memory may, to some extent, be seen as intra-individual communication. The relationship of this study of cross-cultural communication using abstract referents to research on linguistic relativity using color chips may be placed in a broader framework. Both language and referents may be categorized according to the extent to which they are culture bound. Certain words and things which are obviously culture bound (common in one culture, rare in the other) may be distinguished from those which appear to be

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Relativity

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culture free (similar frequency of occurrence in the two cultures). But the apparently culture-free category may include instances of subtle cultureboundedness, given the impossibility of proving anything culture free in all domains. Thus, the culture-free category must always be tentative. Within the culture-free category one may distinguish between those instances which occur with equal frequency because they are novel in both cultures and those which occur with equal frequency because they are common in both cultures. A conceptual scheme relating referents and language according to these categories is presented in Table 3 which includes examples of types of referents and language. Several observations may be made by inspection of Table 3. First, cells 1 and 2 are of little use in research on linguistic or referential relativity. Noone questions that reference is easier with a culturally shared nomenclature (cell 1) or that reference by a culture-bound metaphor will translate only with difficulty (cell 2). Research on linguistic relativity has dealt with the impact of culture-bound language on cognitive processes with culture-free referents in such areas as memory and classification (cell 3). The present study is located in cells 5 and 8 of Table 3 which contain the intersection of culture-free referents and culture-free language. The logic of research in these cells is as follows: Take referents which appear on the surface to be culture-free, select encodings which appear on the surface to be culture-free, and translate these encodings into a second language. Different patterns of response in this supposedly culture-free communication process are then taken as evidence that the surface appearance of being culture-free was misleading for either the referents, the language, or both. Space does not permit complete discussion of the suggestions for further research implicit in other cells in Table 3. For example, cells 4 and 7 point to a design in which Japanese and American speakers would be asked to communicate about a set of Japanese ideographs “without naming them but so that another speaker will know which one you mean.” Different theoretical models of communication would yield different predictions as to whether greater familiarity would facilitate or interfere with performance. Several other extensions of this work would seem likely to bear fruit. Individual differences in response patterns deserve attention. All too often cross-cultural research is concerned with group differences, and this focus causes individual differences within culture to be neglected. Yet cultures are ensembles of individuals. The dispersion of choices for such expressions as “a shutter of a camera” in both cultures points to the greater within-culture than between-culture variance for some messages. Research using color names might benefit from greater attention to individual differences. Rosch (1974, p. 107) suggests looking for two cultures

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: “two small lines in the corner pointing up”

7

Language: “has a straight line on the bottom!

Language: “like a broken egg shell”

4

Language : “eyelashes on the left”

Language

Language: “like a kappa’s hand”

1

Language : “kappa” (mythical Japanese elf unique to culture)

2

8

5

red color

in

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Language: “like blood”

9

6

3 Language: “red” (where one language lacks words for “red”)

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in one culture,

Common

rare in the other.

Culture-Bound

Obviously

REFERENTS

Conceptual scheme for the interaction of language and referents

Referential

Relativity

23 1

which have different numbers of color terms for two different regions in the color space and examining effects on memory. Given the large individual differences within one culture, it might be simpler to test a large sample of people and select individuals with different patterns of association to color names. Shifting our focus from single messages to individual performance over the set of 64 messages, we find large individual differences in total number of messages responded to as intended (“correctly”, in one sense). Why is it that some individuals in both cultures are better able to go “beyond the information given” (Brunei-, 1957/73)? These individual differences may result from an unconscious stochastic sampling of experience (Rosenberg & Cohen, 1968) or more effective information processing strategies. In discussions of the instrument with the individuals who served as subjects in this study, the authors were struck by the surprise expressed by some individuals at the choices of other individuals. Spirited discussions ensued as individuals sought to explain why they thought their choice looked like the description - explanations whose receptions ranged from “Ah, ha. I see”. to incredulity. (One curious implication of the fact that many of the associations could not be anticipated by most individuals is that the best communicators might simply be those individuals with the most modal associations. Pity the creative or eccentric person!). Better instruments are needed for research on communication skill. One might attempt to measure the skill with which individuals were able to predict the decodability of a set of descriptions, a process related to social cognition (Shantz, 1975). A person whose choices of effective messages correspond most accurately with the actual responses of a sample of the population might be a person who would also be skillful in referential communication. Extending this to cross-cultural communication, a translator who demonstrated not only an ability to identify effective messages but also to make distinct choices for two cultures might be thought of as one who was “culturally decentered” (Brislin, 1976, p. 23; Werner & Campbell, 1970). Systematic application of this technique to a large sample of messages about a broad sample of domains might lead to a theory of domains in which two cultures were likely to produce mutually culture-bound encodings. Extension of this work to several cultures might permit some quantitative estimate of the relative culture-boundedness among them, leading to some assessment as to the relative influence of language and referents upon referential relativity. Study of developmental trends in culture-boundedness of communication might yield interesting insights into whether meaning systems converge or

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diverge between cultures from childhood to maturity (See Anglin, 1977). Research in progress is directed at this question of whether children’s or adults’ encodings show a greater degree of culture-boundedness. Whatever the relationship of language to thought at the deepest level, it is clear that culture and language taken together do influence what is thought about, the connotative and denotative associations of the words with which such thought is communicated, and the efficiency with which reference can be made. Language is essential to communication. Neither individuals nor cultures communicate perfectly about ideas which are complex enough to be interesting. But they do communicate, and better understanding of how individuals and cultures come to have differentiated lexical associations may lead to better understanding. Finally, it should be stressed that the data in this paper should not be interpreted as evidence of uniquely large differences between the Japanese and American cultures. Comparable differences would probably be found between other cultures. Also, the emphasis in this paper on culture bound messages should not cause us to overlook the fact that most of the 64 messages did not turn out to be culture bound. Given that these were ambiguous messages about abstract referents, the similarity of response patterns to most of them is extraordinary. Insofar as students in different cultures responded almost identically to messages such as “a little bird flying” and “a frog without eyeballs” we need not fear that cultures might be mutually unintelligible.

References Anglin, J. M. (1977) Word, object, and conceptualdevelopment. Angoff, W. H., and Ford, A. 1:. (1973) Item-race interaction

New York, Norton. on a test of scholastic

aptitude.

J. educ.

Measure. IO, 95-106. Arnheim, R. (1969) Visual thinking. Berkeley, University of California Press. Brislin, R. W. (1976) Introduction, In R. W. Brislin (Ed.), Translations: Applications and research. New York, Wiley. Brown R. (1976) Refcrcnce: In memorial tribute to Eric Lenneberg. Cog., 4, 125-153. Bruner, 5. S. (1973) Going beyond the information given. In J. S. Bruner, Beyond the information given. (J. M.Anglin, Ed.) New York, Norton, (Reprinted from J. S. Bruner, eta/., Contemporary approaches to cognition, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard, 1957). Dickson, W. P. (1974) The development of interpersonal referential communication skills in young children using an interactional game device. (Doctoral dissertation, Stanford University, 1974). Dissertation Abstracts International, 35, 3511-A. (University Microfilms No. 74-27,008). Dickson, W. P. (1976) A definition of “effectiveness” of messages in referential communication. Unpublished manuscript, University of Wisconsin. Dickson, W. P., Miyake, N., & Muto, T. (1975) Decoding descriptions of abstract referents test. Unpublished test booklet. Available from first author.

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Dickson, W. P., Nagano, S., Miyake, N., and Oshima, Y. (1976) Cultural and institutional differences in communication styles. Paper presented at the meeting of the American Educational Research Association, San Francisco, April 1976. Flavell, .I. H., Botkin, P. T., Fry, C. L., Jr., Wright, J. W., & Jarvis, P. E. (1968) The development of role-taking and communication skills in children. New York, Wiley. Garner, W. R. (1962) Uncertainty and structure as psychological concepts. New York, Wiley. Glucksberg, S., Krauss, R. M., and Higgins, E. T. (1975) The development of referential communication skills. In I:. D. Horowitz (Ed.), Review of child development research (Vol. 4). Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Heider, I.. R. (1971) Style and accuracy of verbal communications within and between social classes. J. Person. social Psychol., 18, 3747. Hcider, E. R. (1972) Universals in color naming and memory. J. exp. Psychol., 93, 10-20. Krauss, R. M., and Glucksberg, S. (1969) The development of communication: Competence as a function of age. Child Devel., 40, 255-266. Krauss, R. M., and Wcinheimer, S. (1966) Concurrent feedback, confirmation and the encoding of referents in verbal communication. J. Person. social Psychol., 4, 343-346. Osgood, C. I?., May, W. H., and Muon, M. S. (1975) Cross-cultural universals of affective meaning. Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press. Rosch, E. (1974) Linguistic relativity. In A. Silverstein (Ed.), Human communication: Theoretical explorations. New York, Wiley. Rosenberg, S., & Cohen, B. D. (1968) Referential processes of speakers and listeners. Psychol. Rev., 73, 208-231. Shantz, C. U. (1975) The development of social cognition. In E. M. Hetherington (Ed.), Review of child development research (Vol. 5). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shantz, C. U., and Wilson, K. E. (1972) Training communication skills in young children. Child Devel., 43, 6933698. Werner, H., and Kaplan, B. (1964) Symbol formation. New York, Wiley. Werner., O., and Campbell, D. (1970) Translating, working through interpreters, and the problem of decentering. In R. Naroll and R. Cohen (Eds.), A handbook of method in cultural anthropology. New York, American Museum of Natural History. Whorf, B. L. (1956) Language, thought and reality. (J. Carroll, Ed.), Cambridge, Mass.: M.I.T. Press.

Resume

On a present& i des etudiants Japonais, une serie de 15 referents abstraits, en leur demandant de dkcrire chaque fiiurc de telle sorte qu’un autre Ctudiant puisse correctement l’identifier dans la serie. Chaque referent etait ddcrit deux fois: une fois, de facon metaphorique et l’autre fois, de facon analytique. Une suite test comprenant 64 de ces descriptions a et& traduit en anglais. Deux groupes d’etudiants Japonais voyaient la version japonaise, et deux groupes d’etudiants Americains voyaient la version anglaise. Les ktudiants avaient i choisir parmi les 16 referents, celui qui correspondait le mieux a la description pr&ent&. Les deux groupes de Japonais ont donnk dcs patterns de rkponses t&s semblables, et les deux groupes d’Americains ont fait de meme. Cependant, la comparaison entre les deux cultures, met en evidence des patterns de reponses t&s differents. Les descriptions metaphoriques comme les descriptions analytiques, induisent des patterns de rkponses differents dans les deux cultures. Ces resultats sont interpret& comme la preuve d’un “relativisme referentiel” c’est-a-dire comme un effet de langage et de culture sur le sens refkrentiel. Les auteurs discutent de l’utilisation des tlches de communication refdrentielle comme mesure des demarcations culturelles de la communication.