The Strømnes model is presented in the form of a line drawn from an external stimulus (verbalization / visual observation) to the internal (central nervous system) function – to the memory and to the formation of images. According to this, the observation is encoded by language-specific structures into the memory from which they are communicated in verbal form forward. Hunt and Agnoli (1991, 381) have suggested a mechanism of the same type. In the following experiments, both the presence of language-characteristic structures in verbal messages and the targeting of attention were studied.
According to the Strømnes model, Finnish cases convey topological (relationship) information, while Swedish prepositions convey vector-geometric information. Thus, according to Strømnes, cases are noun-operators and prepositions are verb-operators. On this basis, it can be assumed that verbs are more important in the Indo-European languages for information transmission than in Finnish, and that topological information is communicated in the Finnish language before movement information. These hypotheses were studied by analyzing the number of verbs in newspaper headlines and ice-hockey reports, the quality of the information transmitted in hockey reports, and allowing test subjects to evaluate the completeness of sentences when different sentence members were excluded from them (Strømnes, 1974). The results were as expected. There were fewer verbs in the Finnish newspaper headlines (although the difference was small) and the Finnish ice-hockey reporter left more often out the verb than his Swedish-speaking colleague when using incomplete sentences. In addition, Finnish-language sentences were considered to be more complete than those of the Swedish-language ones when the verbs were excluded.
In the same study, the information content of the hockey reports was evaluated according to whether the information provided was topological or vectoral. The difference was very clear: the Swedish speakers spoke more often about the movements of the puck or the player than the Finns who referred more often to the grouping of players in the rink. The difference in verbal behavior between language groups was reflected in both the structure of sentences and the information provided, while the task or observation field was the same. Clearly, different language hockey reporters followed different things in the rink, so language also guided observation.
REFERENCES
Hunt, E. & Agnoli, F. (1991) The Whorfian hypothesis: A cognitive psychology perspective. Psychological Review, 98, 377-389.
Strømnes, F.J. (1974) To be is not always to be. The hypothesis of cognitive universality in the light of studies on elliptic language behaviour. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 15, 89-98.