Project by: Oona Obaditch (10th Grade), Kate Rotundo (10th Grade)
Project Advisor: Antonio Valle
Student(s)’s Advisor(s): Jonathan Segal and Stephen Macgillivray
Description of the Project:
We want to research how language impacts the way we think, perceive life, and learn. There are many studies about how the language you speak influences the way you think, express emotions and feelings, perceive time, gender, and even color. We think this is a really interesting topic that we don’t see talked about a lot. We hope to broaden our understanding of language and what challenges there are when living in a country or going to a school that bases it’s everyday life off of a different language than the one you primarily speak at home. We want to explore how different our everyday phrases, words, and their meanings differ from language to language. Eventually after we research and gather information, we can prove how language impacts the way we think.
Final Product (e.g., documents, images, video, audio, poster, display, etc.):
Final Reflection on Learning:
When we first got started on this research project we had no idea how big of an impact language would have on any of us. We knew that there must be some differences across the world when it comes to the way we think, but not to the extent that we learned. We feel that the research we conducted opens the floor up to so many more questions we can ask ourselves about language. The question “how does language shape the way we think?” could be explored forever. There is always more research you can do and a way to dive deeper into the world of our minds. Before this project we never talked about this topic before, but after knowing the information that we do now, its hard to not think about it often, especially since we use language every day. Taking something so simple and overlooked as language and exploring it, you can find out very impactful information. None of us think the exact same way, and the similarities between us get further and further away as language differentiates across us all. This research project has been extremely thought provoking, interesting, and left us both in amazement, and we hope to explore it more in the future.
Update on Progress from Weeks 1-3 (include any photos or video if relevant):
During these weeks we began to understand the general impact language has on our brains. We researched small examples of differences we see in languages when comparing them to english. We are starting with small differences, and gradually working up to bigger ones. So far we have researched languages that impact the way we view, color, gender, direction/location, and time. We carefully analyzed experiments done by other people to test theories on language and how it impacts us. In the coming weeks we plan to broaden our understanding of language and research bigger impacts it has on our world.
Update on Progress from Weeks 4-6 (include any photos or video if relevant):
In this time, through analyzing several texts and projects that investigate and explain the way that language not only manifests in your brain, but affects your everyday thought processes, we are more able to understand the extent that the specific language that you speak affects everything from your memory, to the way that you interpret colors and the entire outside world. Language is one of the main parts of everyday life, culture, and interaction. We dove deeper into our research on specific topics surrounding language. We looked at the way we perceive objects across languages because of the way they are gendered. This took us into learning about how many famous statues, and art pieces are represented the way they are because of gendered words.
Update on Progress from Weeks 7-9 (include any photos or video if relevant):
During these last few weeks we have done our last pieces of research concerning the 5 major differences we see in language: memory, gender, color, direction, and time. We have taken these broad topics and split them up into different categories. For example, not only did we learn about how early childhood development ties to language impacting our memory, but we also explored the impact of memory through sentence structure. We worked on gathering all of our information into one place that could be easily understood and explored by anyone interested in learning what we researched.
