Moving to a foreign country means confronting new forms of social etiquette, different understandings of some of basic assumptions about behavior, like knowing the appropriate time to order a coffee, and, of course, our understandings of language. A language barrier, simply as different sounds to represent the same things, may be obvious on the surface. What is not so obvious is how underlying differences exist not only in what words mean translated, but also in an individual’s essential understanding of language. Cultural differences in the understanding of idioms helps to illustrate how culture reflects contingencies, like behavior and biological evolution, and the processes that take part in the reinforcement and relational framing of language.
Skinner proposed that selection by consequences is affected by environmental contingencies at three levels; biology, behavior (operant conditioning), and culture (Skinner, 1981). Selection at each level affects selection at subsequent levels, beginning with biology. Culture thus represents the culmination of the three. Idioms, representing the complex role culture can play in language, wherein phrases can only be understood with context and contain an informal meaning, allow for insight into a culture and the contexts that contributed to their formation.
Examining the ways that native speakers of different languages understand foreign idioms, allows for insight into how different relational frames are formed between specific words, ideas, and sentence structures, which affect an individual’s behavior. In accordance with Hayes’ relational frame theory, language and behavior are essentially tied by a bottom-up process, wherein perceived stimuli are associated with words that make up a massive neural network of associations. These networks grow through mutual entailment (A=B then B=A), combinatorial entailment (A>B, B>C… A>C) and transformation of function (A=B, differences in A from differences in B) (Brabender and Fallon, 2019).. In our ability, or lack of ability, to understand the meanings behind a foreign idiom, there may exist some insight into how some words and sentence structures are fused.
Most interestingly, I completely misunderstood “In the mouth of the wolf” and “without hair on his tongue” which I can intuitively attribute towards my own relational understandings of wolf=danger, and tongue, in an idiom sense, typically being associated with speaking the truth. Connections also can be made for understood idioms. “Don’t break my chestnuts” appears very similarly in wording and sentence structure to an English idiom. “You wanted a bike? Now you’ve got to ride it” is extremely similar to “You made your bed, now you have to lay in it” in its sentence structure. “Go get blessed/ go to that town” could also be compared to similar idioms in English. It is difficult to examine and attribute the Italian understanding of our idioms due to a lack of research and knowledge on the culture but, presumably, to break down these understandings and misunderstandings in a scientific way, could shed some light upon how certain cognitive frame networks are formed at a biological level, are subsequently reinforced in behavior, and finally make their way into common cultural understandings.
References:
Brabender, V., & Fallon, A. (2019). Acceptance and commitment therapy—Group. In Group psychotherapy in inpatient, partial hospital, and residential care settings. (pp. 259–294). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Skinner, B. (1981). Selection by Consequences. Science, 213(4507), 501-504.
