The Way I See It # 384

I have a feeling that I have been bred to be the way I am.

Obviously.

Learning is a cultural aspect, and while my parents obviously had a hand in raising me that way they did, I never thought that parents could teach their children differently, perhaps based on the language they speak. I learned through, supposedly, pointing out objects and reading off their names. My learning process as a child was entirely object/noun based, and thus when it comes to picking out something, and observing, I tend to observe focal objects much more readily than my surrounding environment. I wish this wasn't the case. I think it is more useful to think of things in relationships to others. In Chinese, this is how children are taught to learn. Parents speaking chinese will teach their children objects through relations, rather than simply naming objects. So their learning patterns are verb-based, rather than noun based.

Do you think that by growing up here, learning the way I have gives me an entirely biased view of the world? Why didn't it occur to me to see the whole picture, rather than parts of it that I wanted to see? Has my whole perception been skewed? I guess someone who learned in Chinese could say the same thing. It just makes us different.

However, In my linguistics class I took a test to test my perspective and I scored dramatically in the "Eastern Sense", meaning, that the objects I chose matched with answers that Asians rather than Westerners. Does this make my perception Asian? No.... because in the study about 60% of Westerns thought in the western sense.... so I guess I'm just in the "weird" 40%.

The more and more I think about language, culture, and cognition, the more fascinated I am. It makes me wonder how much learning and "nurturing" really play a role in shaping a person. Obviously it's a big role.... but what if we're all hardwired to think in a certain way?

Some argue that Children cannot possibly learn language on their own at such a young age, and that they have an internal cognitive mechanism that is a road map for language. Do you agree with this?