Aboriginal and white Australian adolescent males classified stimuli along a specifically Aboriginal or a moiety dimension of dual organization and a colour dimension. A 2 x 2 randomized factorial design with simple reaction time (SRT) as the covariate showed that Aborigines recorded significantly greater choice-reaction times (CRT) on both CRT tasks. A significant culture x task interaction was in the opposite direction to the suggestion that moiety classification would favour Aborigines in a CRT task. Codability was slightly related to CRT for the white Australian group.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
BERNDT, R. M. and C. H. BERNDT (1964) The World of the First Australians: An Introduction to the Traditional Life of the Australian Aborigines. Sydney: Ure Smith.
2.
BOAS, F. (1911) Handbook of American Indian Languages, Part 1. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office.
3.
BROWN, R. W. and E. H. LENNEBERG (1954) "A study in language and cognition."J. of Abnormal and Social Psychology49: 454-462.
4.
CARROLL, J. B. (1963) "Linguistic relativity, contrastive linguistics, and language learning."International Rev. of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching1: 1-20.
5.
CARROLL, J. B. and J. B. CASAGRANDE (1958) "The function of language classifications in behavior," in E. Maccoby et al. (eds.) Readings in Social Psychology. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
6.
COHEN, G. (1969) "The effect of codability of the stimulus on recognition reaction times."British J. of Psychology60: 25-29.
7.
ELKIN, A. P. (1964) The Australian Aborigines: How To Understand Them. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.
8.
FISHMAN, J. A. (1960) "A systematization of the Whorfian hypothesis."Behavioral Sci. 5: 323-339. (also in J. W. Berry and P. R. Dasen, Culture and Cognition: Readings in Cross-Cultural Psychology, London: Methuen, 1973)
9.
HERRIOT, P. (1970) An Introduction to the Psychology of Language. London: Methuen.
10.
ISHIHARA, S. (1966) Tests for Colour-Blindness. Tokyo: S. Kanehara.
11.
KELLY, M. R. and G. PEAK (1973) "The effect of language used in testing on performance of Highland children in New Guinea with culture fair and culture unfair tasks." Presented at Fourth Annual Australian Conference on Cognitive Development, Australian National University, Canberra, February.
12.
KLINEBERG, O. (1935) Race Differences. New York: Harper.
13.
LENNEBERG, E. H. (1957) "A probabilistic approach to language learning."Behavioral Sci. 2: 1-12.
14.
LENNEBERG, E. H. (1953) "Cognition and ethnolinguistics."Language29: 463-471.
15.
LENNEBERG, E. H. and J. M. ROBERTS (1956) The Language of Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications in Anthropology and Linguistics Memoir.
16.
LEVI-STRAUSS, C. (1966) The Savage Mind. London: Weidensfeld & Nicholson.
17.
LEVY-BRUHL, L. (1912) Les fonctions mentales dans les societes. Paris: Alcan. (How Natives Think. London: Allen & Unwin, 1926)
18.
MYERS, C. S. (1901) Report of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press.
19.
NURCOMBE, B. (1970) "Precausal and paracausal thinking: concepts of causality in Aboriginal children."Australian and New Zealand J. of Psychiatry4: 70-81.
20.
POORTINGA, Y. H. (1971) "Cross-cultural study of maximum performance tests: some methodological aspects and some experiments with simple auditory and visual stimuli." Psychologia Africana Monograph Supplement 6.
21.
RIVERS, W.H.R. (1905) "The senses of the Toda."British J. of Psychology1: 321-396.
22.
SERPELL, R. (1969) "The influence of language, education and culture on attentional preference between color and form."International J. of Psychology4: 183-194.
23.
SHANNON, C. E. (1949) "The mathematical theory of communication," in C. E. Shannon and W. Weaver, The Mathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.
24.
SIEGEL, S. (1956) Non-Parametric Statistics for the Behavioral Sciences. New York: McGraw-Hill.
25.
TANAKA, Y. (1964) "The use of entropy measure H, as an index of perceptual sign of codability: a cross-cultural study."Japanese Psych. Research6: 38-45.
26.
WARNER, W. L. (1958) A Black Civilization. New York: Harper.
27.
WHORF, B. L. (1956) Language, Thought and Reality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
28.
WILLIAMS, D. (1971) "A study of children's roles in a rapidly changing Aboriginal community." Ph.D. dissertation. University of Queensland, Brisbane.
