The next post will be an edited version of a paper by the late professor Strømnes. In 2007 he gave a speech to a group of EU-translators in Brussels. His notes had lain in my archives for twelve years until I had the opportunity to edit them.
You may consider that paper a short version of his 2006 book. In his book Strømnes argues for the view that human information processing is based on mental models, which, by the way, makes perfect sense considering human evolution. The early humans had to master the world by some means before there was any language. Words in Strømnes’ theory fulfil an auxiliary function: the words are the addresses that the brain uses to find the places where it has stored its mental models. Observe that this is different from Paivio’s dual-coding theory. See my previous post.
The third main point in Strømnes’ theory is that the structure of one’s mother tongue guides the exploration of the world. Every language contains rules as how to combine mental images (statically or dynamically) to express different situations in the outside world.
Most of the studies reported by Strømnes have been conducted in Finland using Finnish- or Swedish-speaking subjects. There is a five percent Swedish-speaking minority in Finland. The Swedish-speaking people live mainly in the coastal regions and often form communities where the majority language is Swedish. This makes it easy for the researcher to compare these two language groups as in every other respect they share the same world considering e.g. economy, education and legislation. These two languages are not related. Swedish belongs to the Indo-European group together with e.g. French, English, German, and the other Scandinavian languages. Finnish belongs to the Ural-Altaic group together with Estonian, Hungarian, and a group of Finnish-related small languages spoken in the western parts of Russia.
Swedish uses prepositions which describe movement in a 3D-space as Finnish uses inflections (cases) which describe relations or changes in those relations. Using two languages that are not related is a very different situation from that when related languages (e.g. French and English) are used.
The paper is fairly long, 10 pages without the figures and more than 20 with figures, remarks, and references, so take your time. Comments are welcome, preferably in English but Finnish and Swedish are OK too.
Paivio, A. (1971) Imagery and verbal processes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Strømnes , F.J. (2006) The fall of the word and the rise of the mental model. A reinterpretation of the research on spatial cognition and language, Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang.