CHAPTER 26 Language and Thought · CHAPTER 26 Language and Thought Lila Gleitman Anna Papafragou...

P1 : JZZ0521824176c26.xml CB798B/Holyoak 0 521 82417 6 October 31 , 2004 16:53

C H A P T E R 2 6

Language and Thought

Lila GleitmanAnna Papafragou

Possessing a language is one of the cen-tral features that distinguishes humans fromother species. Many people share the intu-ition that they think in language and the ab-sence of language therefore would be theabsence of thought. One compelling ver-sion of this self-reflection is Helen Keller’s(1955) report that her recognition of thesigned symbol for ‘water’ triggered thoughtprocesses that had theretofore – and conse-quently – been utterly absent. Statements tothe same or related effect come from themost diverse intellectual sources: “The limitsof my language are the limits of my world”(Wittgenstein, 1922); and “The fact of thematter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large ex-tent unconsciously built upon the languagehabits of the group” (Sapir, 1941 , as cited inWhorf, 1956, p. 75).

The same intuition arises with regard toparticular languages and dialects. Speakingthe language of one’s childhood seems toconjure up a host of social and cultural at-titudes, beliefs, memories, and emotions, asthough returning to the Casbah or to Av-enue L and East 19

th Street and conversingwith the natives opens a window back into

some prior state of one’s nature. But do suchstates of mind arise because one is literallythinking in some new representational for-mat by speaking in a different language? Af-ter all, many people experience the same orrelated changes in sociocultural orientationand sense of self when they are, say, wear-ing their battered old jeans versus some re-quired business suit or military uniform; oreven more poignantly when they reexperi-ence a smell or color or sound associatedwith dimly recalled events. Many such ex-periences evoke other times, other places.

But according to many anthropologicallinguists, sociologists, and cognitive psychol-ogists, speaking a particular language ex-erts vastly stronger and more pervasive in-fluences than an old shoe or the smell ofboiling cabbage. The idea of “linguistic rel-ativity” is that having language, or having aparticular language, crucially shapes mentallife. Indeed, it may not be only that a spe-cific language exerts its idiosyncratic effectsas we speak or listen to it – that languagemight come to “be” our thought; we mayhave no way to think many thoughts, con-ceptualize many of our ideas, without this

633


634 the cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning

language, or outside of and independent ofthis language. From such a perspective, dif-ferent communities of humans, speaking dif-ferent languages, would think differently tothe extent that languages differ from one an-other. But is this so? Could it be so? Thatdepends on how we unpack the notions al-luded to so informally thus far.

In one sense, it is obvious that languageuse has powerful and specific effects onthought. That’s what it is for, or at least thatis one of the things it is for – to transferideas from one mind to another mind. Imag-ine Eve telling Adam “Apples taste great.”This fragment of linguistic information, aswe know, caused Adam to entertain a newthought with profound effects on his worldknowledge, inferencing, and subsequent be-havior. Much of human communication isan intentional attempt to modify others’thoughts and attitudes in just this way. Thisinformation transmission function is crucialfor the structure and survival of cultures andsocieties in all their known forms.

But the language-and-thought debate isnot framed to query whether the contentof conversation can influence one’s attitudesand beliefs, for the answer to that questionis too obvious for words. At issue, rather, isthe degree to which natural languages pro-vide the format in which thought is neces-sarily (or at least habitually) couched. Doformal aspects of a particular linguistic sys-tem (e.g., features of the grammar or thelexicon) organize the thought processes ofits users? One famous “Aye” to this questionappears in the writings of B. L. Whorf in thefirst half of the twentieth century. Accord-ing to Whorf (1956, p. 214), the grammaticaland lexical resources of individual languagesheavily constrain the conceptual representa-tions available to their speakers. To quote:

We are thus introduced to a new principleof relativity, which holds that all observersare not led by the same physical evidenceto the same picture of the universe, unlesstheir linguistic backgrounds are similar, orcan in some way be calibrated.

This relativistic view, in its strictest form,entails that linguistic categories will be

the “program and guide for an individual’smental activity” (Ref. 1 43 , p. 21 2), includ-ing categorization, memory, reasoning, anddecision-making. If this is right, then thestudy of different linguistic systems maythrow light onto the diverse modes of think-ing encouraged or imposed by such systems.Here is a recent formulation of this view(Pederson et al., 1998, p. 586):

We surmise that language structure . . . pro-vides the individual with a system of rep-resentation, some isomorphic version ofwhich becomes highly available for incor-poration as a default conceptual represen-tation. Far more than developing simple ha-bituation, use of the linguistic system, wesuggest, actually forces the speaker to makecomputations he or she might otherwisenot make.

Even more dramatically, according tostronger versions of this general position, wecan newly understand much about the de-velopment of concepts in the child mind:One acquires concepts as a consequence oftheir being systematically instantiated in theexposure language (Bowerman & Levinson,2001 , p. 1 3):

Instead of language merely reflecting thecognitive development which permits andconstrains its acquisition, language isthought of as potentially catalytic andtransformative of cognition.

The importance of this position cannotbe underestimated: Language here becomesa vehicle for the growth of new concepts –those that were not theretofore in the mind,and perhaps could not have been there with-out the intercession of linguistic experience.It therefore poses a challenge to the vener-able view that one could not acquire a con-cept that one could not antecedently enter-tain (Plato, 5

th–4th BCE; Descartes, 1662 ;

Fodor, 1975 , inter alia].Quite a different position is that language,

although being the central human conduitfor thought in communication, memory, andplanning, neither creates nor materially dis-torts conceptual life: Thought is first, lan-guage is its expression. This contrasting viewof cause and effect leaves the link between


language and thought 635

language and mind as strong as ever, andjust as relevant for understanding mentallife. From Noam Chomsky’s universalist per-spective (1975 , p. 4), for example, the formsand contents of all particular languages de-rive, in large part, from an antecedently spec-ified cognitive substance and architecture,and therefore provide a rich diagnostic ofhuman conceptual commonalities:

Language is a mirror of mind in a deep andsignificant sense. It is a product of humanintelligence . . . By studying the properties ofnatural languages, their structure, organi-zation, and use, we may hope to learn some-thing about human nature; something sig-nificant, if it is true that human cognitivecapacity is the truly distinctive and mostremarkable characteristic of the species.

This view of concepts as prior to and pro-genitive of language is not proprietary tothe rationalist position for which Chomskyis speaking here. This commonsensical po-sition is maintained – rather, presupposed –by students of the mind who differ amongthemselves in almost all other regards. Theearly empiricists, for example, took it forgranted that our concepts derive from expe-rience with properties, things, and events inthe world and not, originally, from language(Hume, 1 739; Book I):

To give a child an idea of scarlet or or-ange, of sweet or bitter, I present the ob-jects, or in other words, convey to him theseimpressions; but proceed not so absurdly,as to endeavor to produce the impressionsby exciting the ideas.

And as a part of such experience ofobjects, language learning will come alongfor the ride (Locke, 1690, Book 3 .IX.9;italics ours):

If we will observe how children learn lan-guages, we shall find that, to make themunderstand what the names of simple ideasor substances for, people ordinarily showthem the thing whereof they would havethem have the idea; and then repeat tothem the name that stands for it . . .

Thus linguistic relativity, in the sense ofWhorf and many recent commentators, is

quite novel and, in its strongest interpreta-tions, revolutionary. At the limit, it is a pro-posal for how new thoughts can arise in themind as a result of experience with languagerather than as a result of experience with theworld of objects and events.

Before turning to the recent literatureon language and thought, we want to em-phasize that there are no ideologues readyto man the barricades at the absolute ex-tremes of the debate just sketched. To ourknowledge, none – well, very few – of thosewho are currently advancing linguistic–relativistic themes and explanations believethat infants enter into language acquisitionin a state of complete conceptual naked-ness, later redressed (perhaps we should say“dressed”) by linguistic information. Rather,by general acclaim, infants are believed topossess some “core knowledge” that entersinto first categorization of objects, proper-ties, and events in the world (e.g., Carey,1982 ; Kellman, 1996; Baillargeon, 1993 ;Gelman & Spelke, 1981 ; Leslie & Keeble,1987; Mandler, 1996; Quinn, 2001 ; Spelkeet al., 1992). The general question is howrichly specified this innate basis may beand how experience refines, enhances, andtransforms the mind’s original furnishings.The specific question is whether languageknowledge may be one of these formative ortransformative aspects of experience. To ourknowledge, none – well, very few – of thosewho adopt a nativist position on these mat-ters reject as a matter of a priori convictionthe possibility that there could be salienceeffects of language on thought. For instance,some particular natural language might for-mally mark a category whereas another doesnot; two languages might draw a categoryboundary at different places; two languagesmight differ in the computational resourcesthey require to make manifest a particulardistinction or category.

We will try to draw out aspects of theseissues within several domains in which com-mentators and investigators are trying to dis-entangle cause and effect in the interactionof language and thought. We cannot dis-cuss it all, of course, or even very muchof what is currently in print on this topic.



There is too much of it (for recent antholo-gies, see Gumperz & Levinson, 1996; Bower-man & Levinson, 2001 ; Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003).

Do We Think In Language?

We begin with a very simple question: Doour thoughts take place in natural language?If so, it would immediately follow thatWhorf was right all along, since speak-ers of Korean and Spanish, or Swahili andHopi would have to think systematically dif-ferent thoughts.

If language directly expresses our th-ought, it seems to make a poor job of it.Consider for example the final (nonparen-thetical) sentence in the preceding section:

1 . There is too much of it.

Leaving aside, for now, the problemsof anaphoric reference (what is “it”?), thesentence still has at least two interpre-tations that are compatible with its dis-course context:

1a. There is too much written on linguisticrelativity to fit into this article.

1b. There is too much written on linguisticrelativity. (Period!)

We authors had one of these two inter-pretations in mind (guess which one). Wehad a thought and expressed it as (1 ) butEnglish failed to render that thought unam-biguously, leaving doubt between (1a) and(1b). One way to think about what this ex-ample portends is that language cannot, or inpractice does not, express all and only whatwe mean. Rather, language use offers hintsand guideposts to hearers, such that they canusually reconstruct what the speaker had inmind by applying to the uttered words agood dose of common sense – aka thoughts,inferences, and plausibilities – in the world.

The question of just how to apportion theterritory between the underlying semanticsof sentences and the pragmatic interpreta-tion of the sentential semantics, of course, isfar from settled in linguistic and philosoph-

ical theorizing. Consider the sentence It israining. Does this sentence directly – that is,as an interpretive consequence of the linguis-tic representation itself – convey an assertionabout rain falling here, in the immediate ge-ographical environment of the speaker? Ordoes the sentence – the linguistic represen-tation – convey only that rain is falling, leav-ing it for the common sense of the listener todeduce that the speaker likely meant raininghere and now rather than raining today inBombay or on Mars; likely, too, that if thesentence was uttered indoors, the speakermore likely meant here to convey “just out-side of here” than “right here, as the roofis leaking.” The exact division of labor be-tween linguistic semantics and pragmaticshas implications for the language–thoughtissue, because the richer (one claims that)the linguistic semantics is, the more likely itis that language guides our mental life. With-out going into detail, we will argue that lin-guistic semantics cannot fully envelop andsubstitute for inferential interpretation, andthe representations that populate our mentallife therefore cannot be identical to the rep-resentations that encode linguistic (seman-tic) meaning.

Language is Sketchy, Thought is Rich

There are several reasons to believe thatthought processes are not definable over rep-resentations that are isomorphic to linguis-tic representations. One is the pervasive am-biguity of words and sentences. Bat, bank,and bug all have multiple meanings in En-glish and are associated with multiple con-cepts, but these concepts themselves areclearly distinct in thought, as shown interalia by the fact that one may consciouslyconstruct a pun. Moreover, several linguis-tic expressions including pronouns (he, she)and indexicals (here, now) crucially rely oncontext for their interpretation whereas thethoughts they are used to express are usu-ally more specific. Our words are often se-mantically general – i.e., they fail to makedistinctions that nevertheless are present in



thought: Uncle in English does not semanti-cally specify whether the individual comesfrom the mother’s or the father’s side, orwhether he is a relative by blood or mar-riage, but usually the speaker who utters“my uncle” . . . possesses the relevant infor-mation. Indeed, lexical items typically takeon different interpretations tuned to the oc-casion of use (He has a square face. The roomis hot.) and depend on inference for theirprecise construal in different contexts (e.g.,the implied action is systematically differ-ent when we open an envelope/a can/an um-brella/a book, or when an instance of thatclass of actions is performed to serve dif-ferent purposes: Open the window to let inthe evening breeze/the cat]. Moreover, thereare cases in which linguistic output doesnot even encode a complete thought orproposition (tomorrow, maybe). Finally, thepresence of implicatures and other kindsof pragmatic inference ensures that – tosteal a line from the Mad Hatter – althoughspeakers generally mean what they say, theydo not and could not say exactly whatthey mean.

From this and related evidence, it ap-pears that linguistic representations under-determine the conceptual contents they areused to convey: Language is sketchy com-pared with the richness of our thoughts (fora related discussion, see Fisher & Gleitman,2002]. In light of the limitations of lan-guage, time, and sheer patience, languageusers make reference by whatever catch-as-catch-can methods they find handy, in-cluding the waitress who famously told an-other that “The ham sandwich wants hischeck” (Nunberg, 1978). What chiefly mat-ters to talkers and listeners is that successfulreference be made, whatever the means athand. If one tried to say all and exactly whatone meant, conversation could not happen;speakers would be lost in thought. Instead,conversation involves a constant negotiationin which participants estimate and updateeach others’ background knowledge as a ba-sis for what needs to be said given what ismutually known and inferable (e.g., Grice,1975 ; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Clark, 1992 ;Bloom, 2002).

In limiting cases, competent listeners ig-nore linguistically encoded meaning if itpatently differs from what the speaker in-tended – for instance, by smoothly andrapidly repairing slips of the tongue. Oxfordundergraduates had the wit, if not the grace,to snicker when Reverend Spooner reput-edly said, “Work is the curse of the drink-ing classes.” Often, the misspeaking is noteven consciously noticed but is repaired to fitthe thought, evidence enough that the wordand the thought are two different matters.1

The same latitude for thought to range be-yond established linguistic means holds forthe speakers, too. Wherever the local lin-guistic devices and locutions seem insuffi-cient or overly constraining, speakers inventor borrow words from another language, de-vise similes and metaphors, and sometimesmake permanent additions and subtractionsto the received tongue. It would be hard tounderstand how they do so if language wereitself, and all at once, both the format andvehicle of thought.

All the cases just mentioned refer to par-ticular tokenings of meanings in the id-iosyncratic interactions between people. Adifferent problem arises when languagescategorize aspects of the world in ways thatare complex and inconsistent. An example isreported by Malt et al. (1999). They exam-ined the vocabulary used by English, Span-ish, and Chinese subjects to label the variouscontainers we bring home from the grocerystore full of milk, juice, ice cream, bleach, ormedicine (e.g., jugs, bottles, cartons, boxes).As the authors point out, containers sharenames based not only on some perceptual re-semblances, but also on very local and partic-ular conditions, with size, shape, substance,contents, and nature of the contents, notto speak of the commercial interests of thepurveyor, all playing interacting and shift-ing roles. In present-day American English,for instance a certain plastic container thatlooks like a bear with a straw stuck in itshead is called a juice box, although it is notboxy either in shape (square or rectangu-lar) or typical constitution (your prototypi-cal American box is made of cardboard). Thelanguages Malt et al. studied differ markedly



in the set of terms available for this domain,and also in how their subjects extended theseterms to describe diverse new containers.Speakers of the three languages differed inwhich objects (old and new) they classifiedtogether by name. For example, a set of ob-jects distributed across the sets of jugs, con-tainers, and jars by English speakers wereunified by the single label frasco by Spanishspeakers. Within and across languages, noteverything square is a box, not everythingglass is a bottle, not everything not glass isnot a bottle, etc. The naming, in short, is acomplex mix resulting from perceptual re-semblances, historical influences, and a gen-erous dollop of arbitrariness. Yet Malt et al.’ssubjects did not differ much (if at all) fromeach other in their classification of these con-tainers by overall similarity rather than byname. Nor were the English and Spanish, asone might guess, more closely aligned than,say, the Chinese and Spanish. So here wehave a case in which cross-linguistic practicegroups objects in a domain in multiple waysthat have only flimsy and sporadic correla-tions with perception, without discernibleeffect on the nonlinguistic classificatory be-haviors of users.2

So far, we have emphasized that languageis a relatively impoverished and underspeci-fied vehicle of expression that relies heavilyon inferential processes outside the linguisticsystem for reconstructing the richness andspecificity of thought. If correct, this seemsto place rather stringent limitations on howlanguage could serve as the original engineand sculptor of our conceptual life. Never-theless, it is possible to maintain the ideathat certain formal properties of languagecausally affect thought in more subtle, butstill important, ways.

Use It or Lose It: LanguageDetermines the Categories of Thought

We begin by mentioning the most famousand compelling case of a linguistic influ-ence on perception: categorical perceptionof the phoneme (Liberman, 1970; Liberman

et al., 1967; Kuhl et al., 1992). Childrenbegin life with the capacity and inclinationto discriminate among all of the acoustic–phonetic properties by which languages en-code distinctions of meaning, a result fa-mously documented by Peter Eimas (Eimaset al., 1971 ) using a dishabituation paradigm(for details and significant expansions of thisbasic result, see Jusczyk, 1985 ; and for ex-tensions with neonates, Pena et al., 2003].These authors showed that an infant willwork (e.g., turn its head or suck on a nip-ple] to hear a syllable such as ba. After someperiod of time, the infant habituates; thatis, its sucking rate decreases to some baselevel. The high sucking rate can be rein-stated if the syllable is switched to, say, pa,demonstrating that the infant detects the dif-ference. These effects are heavily influencedby linguistic experience. Infants only a yearor so of age – just when true language ismaking its appearance – have become in-sensitive to phonetic distinctions that arenot phonemic (play no role at higher lev-els of linguistic organization) in the expo-sure language (Werker & Tees, 1984). Al-though these experience-driven effects arenot totally irreversible in cases of long-termsecond-language immersion, they are perva-sive and dramatic (for discussion, see Werker& Logan, 1985 ; Best, McRoberts, & Sithole,1988). Without special training or unusualtalent, the adult speaker–listener can effec-tively produce and discriminate the phoneticcategories required in the native tongue,and little more. Not only that, these dis-criminations are categorical in the sensethat sensitivity to within-category phoneticdistinctions is poor and sensitivity at thephonemic boundaries is especially acute. Al-though the learning and use of a specific lan-guage has not created perceptual elementsde novo, certainly it has refined, organized,and limited the set of categories at this levelin radical ways. As we will discuss, sev-eral findings in the concept-learning litera-ture have been interpreted analogously tothis case.

An even more intriguing effect in this gen-eral domain is the reorganization of phoneticelements into higher-level phonological



categories as a function of specific lan-guage spoken. For example, American En-glish speech regularly lengthens vowels insyllables ending with a voiced consonant(e.g., ride and write) and neutralizes the t/ddistinction in favor of a dental flap in cer-tain unstressed syllables. The effect is that(in most dialects) the consonant sounds inthe middle of rider and writer are physicallythe same. Yet the English speaking listenerseems to perceive a d/t difference in thesewords all the same, and – except when askedto reflect carefully – fails to notice the char-acteristic difference in vowel length that hisor her own speech faithfully reflects. Thecomplexity of this phonological reorganiza-tion is often understood as a reconciliation(interface) of the cross-cutting phonetic andmorphological categories of a particular lan-guage. Ride ends with a d sound; write endswith a t sound; morphologically speaking,rider and writer are just ride and write wither added on; therefore, the phonetic entitybetween the syllables in these two wordsmust be d in the first case and t in the sec-ond. Morphology trumps phonetics (for dis-cussion see Bloch & Trager, 1942 ; Chomsky,1964 ; Gleitman & Rozin, 1977].

When considering linguistic relativity,one might be tempted to write off the pho-netic categorical perception effect as onethat merely tweaks the boundaries of acous-tic distinctions built into the mammalianspecies, a not-so-startling sensitizing effect oflanguage on perception. But the phonolog-ical effect just discussed is no mere tweak.There has been a systemic reorganization,creating a new set of lawfully recombina-torial elements, one that varies very signif-icantly cross-linguistically.

Much of the literature on linguistic rel-ativity can be understood as raising relatedissues in various perceptual and conceptualdomains. Is it the case that distinctions oflexicon or grammar made regularly in one’slanguage sensitize one to these distinctionsand suppress or muffle others? Even to theextent of radically reorganizing the domain?An important literature has investigated thisissue using the instance of color names andcolor perception. Languages differ in their

terms for hue and brightness (Berlin & Kay,1969; cf. Kay & Regier, 2002). Do psy-chophysical judgments differ accordingly?For instance, are adjacent hues that share aname in a particular language judged moresimilar by its speakers than equal-magnitudedifferences in wavelength and intensity thatare consensually given different names inthat language? And are the similarity spacesof speakers of other languages different inthe requisite ways? Such language-causeddistinctions have been measured in variousways – e.g. discrimination across hue label-ing boundaries (speed, accuracy, confusabil-ity), memory, and population comparisons.By and large, the results of such cross-linguistic studies suggest a remarkable in-dependence of hue perception from label-ing practice (e.g., Brown & Lenneberg, 1954 ;Heider & Oliver, 1972). One relevant find-ing comes from red–green color-blind indi-viduals (Jameson & Hurwich, 1978). Theperceptual similarity space of the hues forsuch individuals is systematically differentfrom that of individuals of normal vision;that is what it means to be colorblind. Yeta large subpopulation of red–green color-blind individuals names hues, even of newthings, consensually with normal-sighted in-dividuals and orders these hue labels con-sensually. That is, these individuals do notperceptually order a set of color chips withthe reds at one end, the greens at the other,and the oranges somewhere in between; yetthey organize the words with red semanti-cally at one end, green at the other, and orangesomewhere in between. In short, the nam-ing practices and perceptual organization ofcolor mismatch in these individuals, a factthat they rarely notice until they enter thevision laboratory.

Overall, the language–thought relationsfor one perceptual domain (speech-soundperception) appear to be quite differ-ent from those in another perceptual do-main (hue perception]. Language influencesacoustic phonetic perception much morethan it influences hue perception. As a re-sult, there is no deciding in advance that lan-guage does or does not influence perceptuallife. Moreover, despite the prima facie



relevance of these cases and the eleganceof the literature that investigated them, theperception of relatively low-level percep-tual categories the organization of whichwe share with many nonhuman species areless than ideal places to look for the lin-guistic malleability of thought.3 However,these instances serve to scaffold discussionof language influences at higher levels andtherefore for more elusive aspects of concep-tual organization.

Do the Categories of LanguageBecome the Categories of Thought?

A seminal figure in reawakening interest inlinguistic relativity was Roger Brown, thegreat social and developmental psycholo-gist who framed much of the field of lan-guage acquisition in the modern era. Brown(1957) performed a simple and elegant ex-periment that demonstrated an effect of lex-ical categorization on the inferred meaningof a new word. Young children were showna picture, e.g., of hands that seemed to bekneeding confettilike stuff in an overflow-ing bowl. Some children were told Showme the sib. They pointed to the bowl (asolid rigid object). Others were told Showme some sib. They pointed to the confetti(an undifferentiated mass of stuff ). Otherswere told Show me sibbing. They pointedto the hands and made kneeding motionswith their own hands (an action or event).Plainly, the same stimulus object was repre-sented differently depending on the linguis-tic cues to the lexical categories count noun,mass noun, and verb. That is, the lexical cat-egories themselves have notional correlates,at least in the minds of these young Eng-lish speakers.

Some commentators have argued that thekinds of cues exemplified here – e.g., thatpersons, places, and things surface as nouns –are universal and can play causal roles inthe acquisition of language – of course, bylearners who are predisposed to find justthese kinds of syntactic–semantic correla-

tions natural (Pinker, 1984 ; Gleitman, 1990;Fisher, 1996; Bloom, 1994a; Lidz, Gleitman,& Gleitman, 2003 ; Baker, 2001 , inter alia].Brown saw his result the other way around.He supposed that languages would vary ar-bitrarily in these mappings onto conceptualcategories. If that is so, then language can-not play the causal role that Pinker and oth-ers envisaged for it – i.e., as a cue to an-tecedently “prepared” correlations betweenlinguistic and conceptual categories. Rather,those world properties yoked together bylanguage would cause a (previously uncom-mitted) infant learner to conceive them asmeaningfully related in some ways (Brown,1957, p. 5):

In learning a language, therefore, it must beuseful to discover the semantic correlatesfor the various parts of speech; for this dis-covery enables the learner to use the part-of-speech membership of a new word as afirst cue to its meaning . . . Since [grammat-ical categories] are strikingly different inunrelated languages, the speakers [of theselanguages] may have quite different cogn-itive categories.

As recent commentators have put this po-sition, linguistic regularities are part of thecorrelational mix that creates ontologies, andlanguage-specific properties therefore willbend psychological ontologies in language-specific ways (Smith, Colunga, & Yoshida,2001 ]. The forms of particular languages – orthe habitual language usage of particular lin-guistic communities – by hypothesis, couldyield different organizations of the funda-mental nature of one’s conceptual world:what it is to be a thing or some stuff, or adirection or place, or a state or event. Wewill discuss some research on these categorytypes and their cross-linguistic investigation.But before doing so, we want to mentionanother useful framework for understand-ing potential relations between language andthought: that the tweakings and reorganiza-tions language may accomplish happen un-der the dynamic control of communicativeinteraction, of “thinking for speaking.”



Thinking for Speaking

It is natural to conceive conversation as be-ginning with a thought or mental messageone wishes to convey. This thought is thefirst link in a chain of mental events that,on most accounts, gets translated into suc-cessively more languagelike representations,eventuating in a series of commands to thearticulatory system to utter a word, phrase,or sentence (Levelt, 1989; Dell, 1995). Aswe have just described matters, there is aclear distinction at the two ends of this pro-cess – what you meant to say and how youexpress it linguistically. But this is not soclear. Several commentators, notably DanSlobin (1996, 2003), have raised the possi-bility of a more dynamic and interactive pro-cess in which what one chooses to mean andthe expressive options that one’s languagemakes available are not so clearly divorced.It may not be that speakers of every languageset out their messages identically all the wayup to the time that they arrange the jaw,mouth, and tongue to utter one two three ver-sus un deux trois. Instead, the language onehas learned causes one to “intend to mean” insomewhat different ways. For instance, andas we will discuss in more detail, it may bethat as a speaker of English, with its myriadverbs of manner of motion, one comes to in-spect – and speak of – the world in terms ofsuch manners, whereas a speaker of Greekor Spanish, with a vocabulary emphasizingverbs relating to path of motion, inspects –and speaks of – the world more directly interms of the paths traversed. The organi-zation of the thought, on this view, mightbe dynamically impacted along its course byspecific organizational properties of the in-dividual language.

Slobin (2001 ) and Levelt (1989) havepointed to some cases in which a distinc-tion across languages in the resources de-voted to different conceptual matters seemsalmost inevitable. This case is the closed-class functional vocabulary, the “grammat-ical” words such as modals, auxiliaries, tenseand aspect markers, determiners, comple-mentizers, case markers, prepositions, and

so forth. These words play rather specificgrammatical roles in marking the ways inwhich noun phrases relate to the verb, andhow the predications within a sentence re-late to each other. These same grammati-cal words usually also have semantic con-tent – e.g., the directional properties of fromin John separated the wheat from the chaff.Slobin has given a compendium of the se-mantic functions known to be expressedby such items and these number at leastin the several hundreds, including not onlytense, aspect, causativity, number, person,gender, mood, definiteness, etc., found inEnglish, but also first-hand versus inferredknowledge, social status of the addressee,existence–nonexistence, shape, and manyothers. Both Slobin and Levelt have arguedas follows: As a condition of uttering a well-formed English sentence, the speaker of En-glish must decide for example, whether thenumber of creatures being referred to is oneor more in order to choose the dog or thedogs. Some modicum of mental resources,no matter how small, must be devoted tothis issue repeatedly – hundreds of times aday every day, every week, every year – byEnglish speakers. But speakers of Mandarinneed not think about number, except whenthey particularly want to, because its ex-pression is not grammaticized in their lan-guage. The same is true for all the hundredsof other properties. So either all speakers oflanguages covertly compute all these severalhundred properties as part of their represen-tations of the contents of their sent and re-ceived messages or they compute only someof them – primarily those that they mustcompute to speak and understand the lan-guage of their community. On information-handling grounds, one would suspect thatnot all these hundreds of conceptual inter-pretations and their possible combinationsare computed at every instance. But if onecomputes only what one must for the com-bined purposes of linguistic intelligibilityand present communicative purpose, thenspeakers of different languages, to this ex-tent, must be thinking differently. As Slobin(2001 , p. 442) puts it, “From this point of



view, grammaticizable notions have a role instructuring language-specific mental spaces,rather than being there at the beginning,waiting for an input language to turn themon.” Based on this reasoning, it is plausible toentertain the view of a language-based differ-ence in the dynamics of converting thoughtto speech. How far such effects percolatedownstream is the issue to which we nowturn. Do differences in phraseology, gram-matical morphology, and lexical semanticsof different languages yield underlying dis-parities in their modes of thought?

Semantic Arenas of the Present DayLanguage–Thought Investigation

Objects and Substances

The problem of reference to stuff versus ob-jects has attracted considerable attention be-cause it starkly displays the indeterminacy inhow language refers to the world (Chomsky,1957; Quine, 1960). Whenever we indicate aphysical object, we necessarily indicate someportion of a substance as well; the reverseis also true. Languages differ in their ex-pression of this distinction (Lucy & Gaskins,2001 ). Some languages make a grammaticaldistinction that roughly distinguishes objectfrom substance. Count nouns in such lan-guages denote individuated entities; e.g., ob-ject kinds. These are marked in English withdeterminers such as and the, and are sub-ject to counting and pluralization (a horse,horses, two horses). Mass nouns typically de-note nonindividuated entities – e.g., sub-stance rather than object kinds. These aremarked in English with a different set of de-terminers (more porridge), and need an ad-ditional term that specifies quantity to becounted and pluralized (a tube of toothpasterather than a toothpaste). Soja, Carey, andSpelke (1991 ) asked whether children ap-proach this aspect of language learning al-ready equipped with the ontological dis-tinction between things and substances, orwhether they are led to make this distinc-tion through learning count and mass syntax.Their subjects, English-speaking two-year-

olds, did not yet make these distinctions intheir speech. Soja et al. (1991 ) taught thesechildren words in reference to various typesof unfamiliar displays. Some were solid ob-jects such as a T-shaped piece of wood, andothers were nonsolid substances such as apile of hand cream with sparkles in it. Thechildren were shown such a sample, namedwith a term presented in a syntactically neu-tral frame that identified it neither as a countnor as a mass noun – e.g., This is my blicketor Do you see this blicket? In extending thesewords to new displays, two-year-olds hon-ored the distinction between object and sub-stance. When the sample was a hard-edgedsolid object, they extended the new wordto all objects of the same shape, even whenmade of a different material. When the sam-ple was a nonsolid substance, they extendedthe word to other-shaped puddles of thatsame substance but not to shape matchesmade of different materials. Soja et al. tookthis finding as evidence of a conceptual dis-tinction between objects and stuff, indepen-dent of and prior to the morphosyntactic dis-tinction made in English.

This interpretation was put to strongertests by extending such classificatory tasksto languages that differ from English inthese regards: Either these languages do notgrammaticize the distinction, or they orga-nize it in different ways (see Lucy, 1992 ;Lucy & Gaskins, 2001 , for findings fromYucatec Mayan; Mazuka & Friedman, 2000;Imai & Gentner, 1997, for Japanese). Es-sentially, nouns in these languages all startlife as mass terms, requiring a special gram-matical marker (called a classifier) to becounted. One might claim, then, that sub-stance is in some sense linguistically basic forJapanese whereas objecthood is basic for En-glish speakers because of the dominance ofits count-noun morphology.4 So if childrenare led to differentiate object and substancereference by the language forms themselves,the resulting abstract semantic distinctionshould differ cross-linguistically. To test thisnotion, Imai and Gentner replicated thetests of Soja et al. with Japanese and En-glish children and adults. Some of their find-ings appear to strengthen the evidence for a



universal prelinguistic ontology that permitsus to think about both individual objects andportions of stuff because both American andJapanese children (even two-year-olds) ex-tended names for complex hard-edged non-sense objects on the basis of shape ratherthan substance. The lack of separate gram-matical marking did not put Japanese chil-dren at a disadvantage in this regard.

Another aspect of the results hints at arole for language in categorization, however.Japanese children tended to extend namesfor mushy hand cream displays according totheir substance, for example, whereas Amer-ican children were at chance for these items.There were also discernible language effectson word extension for certain very simplestimuli (e.g., a kidney bean–shaped piece ofcolored wax) that seemed to fall at the on-tological midline between object and sub-stance. Whereas the Japanese at ages two andfour years were at chance on these items, En-glish speakers showed a tendency to extendwords for them by shape.

How are we to interpret these results?Several authors have concluded that onto-logical boundaries literally shift to wherelanguage makes its cuts; that the substancevs. object distinction works much like thecategorical perception effects we noticed forphonemes (and perhaps colors; for an impor-tant statement, see Gentner & Boroditsky,2001 ). Lucy and Gaskins (2001 ) bolster thisinterpretation with evidence that popula-tions speaking different languages differ in-creasingly in this regard with age. Whereasyoung Mayan speakers do not differ muchfrom their English speaking peers, by agenine years, members of the two communitiesdiffer significantly in relevant classificatoryand memorial tasks. The implication is thatlong-term use of a language influences ontol-ogy, with growing conformance of conceptgrouping to linguistic grouping. Of course,the claim is not for a rampant Procrusteanreorganization of thought; only for bound-ary shifting. For displays that blatantly fall toone side or the other of the object/substanceboundary, therefore, the speakers of all thetested languages sort the displays in thesame ways.

As usual, neither the findings nor the in-terpretations of such experiments are easyto attain at the present state of the art. Forone, thing, Mazuka and Friedman (2000)failed to reproduce Lucy’s effects for Mayanversus English speaking subjects’ classifica-tory performance in the predicted furthercase of Japanese. As these authors pointout, the sameness in this regard betweenJapanese and English speakers, and the dif-ference in this regard between Mayan andEnglish speakers, may best be thought of asarising from cultural and educational differ-ences between the populations rather thanlinguistic differences.

In light of all the findings so far reviewed,there is another interpretation of the resultsthat does not implicate an effect of languageon thought, but only an effect of languageon language: One’s implicit understandingof the organization of a specific languagecan influence one’s interpretation of con-versation. Interpretations from this perspec-tive have been offered by many commen-tators. Bowerman (1996), Brown (1958),Landau and Gleitman (1985), and Slobin(1996, 2001 ) propose that native speakersnot only learn and use the individual lexicalitems their language offers, but also learn thekinds of meanings typically expressed by aparticular grammatical category in their lan-guage, and come to expect new membersof that category to have similar meanings.Slobin calls this “typological bootstrapping.”Languages differ strikingly in their commonforms and locutions – preferred fashions ofspeaking, to use Whorf’s phrase. These prob-abilistic patterns could bias the interpreta-tion of new words. Such effects occur inexperiments when subjects are offered lan-guage input (usually nonsense words) un-der conditions in which implicitly knownform-to-meaning patterns in the languagemight hint at how the new word is to beinterpreted.

Let us reconsider the Imai and Gentnerobject–substance effects on this hypothe-sis. As we saw, when the displays them-selves were of nonaccidental-looking hard-edged objects, subjects in both languagegroups opted for the object interpretation.



But when the world was uninformative (e.g.,for softish waxy lima bean shapes), the lis-teners fell back upon linguistic cues, if avail-able. No relevant morphosyntactic clues ex-ist in Japanese, so Japanese subjects choseat random for these indeterminate stimuli.For English-speaking subjects, the linguis-tic stimulus in a formal sense also was in-terpretively neutral: This blicket is a tem-plate that accepts both mass and countnouns (this horse/toothpaste). But here prin-ciple and probability part company. Re-cent experimentation leaves no doubt thatchild and adult listeners incrementally ex-ploit probabilistic facts about word use toguide the comprehension process on line(e.g., Snedeker, Thorpe, & Trueswell, 2001 ).In the present case, any English speakerequipped with even a rough subjective prob-ability counter should take into account themassive preponderance of count nouns overmass nouns in English and conclude that anew word, blicket, used to refer to some in-determinate display, is probably a new countnoun rather than a new mass noun. Countnouns, in turn, tend to denote individualsrather than stuff and so have shape pre-dictivity (Smith, 2001 ; Landau, Smith, &Jones, 1998).

Applying this interpretation, it is not thatspeaking English leads one to tip the scalestoward object representations of newly seenreferents for perceptually ambiguous items,but that hearing English leads one to tipthe scales toward count-noun representa-tion of newly heard nominals in linguis-tically ambiguous structural environments.Derivatively, then, count syntax hints at ob-ject representation of the newly observedreferent. Notice that such effects can beexpected to increase with age as massivelexical–linguistic mental databases are built,consistent with the findings of Lucy andGaskins (2001 ).5

Spatial Relationships

Choi and Bowerman (1991 ) studied the waysin which common motion verbs in Koreandiffer from their counterparts in English.First, Korean motion verbs often contain lo-

cation or geometric information that is moretypically specified by a spatial preposition inEnglish. To describe a scene in which a cas-sette tape is placed into its case, for exam-ple, English speakers would say “We put thetape in the case.” Korean speakers typicallyuse the verb kkita to express the put in rela-tion for this scene. Kkita does not have thesame extension as put in. Both put in andkkita describe an act of putting an object ina location; but put in is used for all cases ofcontainment (fruit in a bowl, flowers in avase) whereas kkita is used only in case theoutcome is a tight fit between two matchingshapes (tape in its case, one Lego piece onanother, glove on hand). Notice that thereis a cross-classification here: Whereas En-glish appears to collapse across tightnessesof fit, Korean makes this distinction butconflates across putting in versus putting on,which English regularly differentiates. Veryyoung learners of these two languages havealready worked out the language-specificclassification of such motion relations andevents in their language, as shown by boththeir usage and their comprehension (Choi& Bowerman, 1991 ).

Do such cross-linguistic differences haveimplications for spatial cognition? Mc-Donough, Choi, and Mandler (2003) fo-cused on spatial contrasts between rela-tions of tight containment vs. loose support(grammaticalized in English by the preposi-tions in and on and in Korean by the verbskkita and nohta) and tight vs. loose contain-ment (both grammaticalized as in in Englishbut separately as kkita and nehta in Korean).They showed that prelinguistic infants (nineto fourteen months old) in both English-and Korean-speaking environments are sen-sitive to such contrasts, and so are Korean-speaking adults (see also Hespos & Spelke,2000, who show that five-month-olds aresensitive to this distinction). Their English-speaking adult subjects, however, showedsensitivity only to the tight containment vs.loose support distinction, which is grammat-icalized in English (in vs. on). The conclu-sion drawn from these results was that somespatial relations that are salient during theprelinguistic stage become less salient for



adult speakers if language does not systemat-ically encode them: “Flexible infants becomerigid adults.”

This interpretation again resembles thatfor the perception of phoneme contrasts, butby no means as categorically. The fact thatEnglish speakers learn and readily use verbssuch as jam, pack, and wedge weakens anyclaim that the lack of common terms seri-ously diminishes the availability of catego-rization in terms of tightness of fit. One pos-sibility is that the observed language-specificeffects with adults are attributable to verbalmediation: Unlike preverbal infants, adultsmay have turned the spatial classificationtask into a linguistic task. It therefore, is use-ful to turn to studies that explicitly compareperformance when subjects from each lan-guage group are instructed to classify ob-jects or pictures by name, as opposed towhen they are instructed to classify the sameobjects by similarity. In one such study, Liet al. (1997) showed Korean- and English-speaking subjects pictures of events such asputting a suitcase on a table (an exampleof on in English, and of “loose support” inKorean). For half the subjects from eachlanguage group (each tested fully in theirown language), these training stimuli werelabeled by a videotaped cartoon characterwho performed the events (I am Miss Pickyand I only like to put things on things. See?),and for the other subjects, the stimuli weredescribed more vaguely (. . . and I only like todo things like this. See?). Later categorizationof new instances followed language in thelabeling condition: English speakers identi-fied new pictures showing tight fits (e.g.,a cap put on a pen) as well as the orig-inal loose-fitting ones as belonging to thecategory that Miss Picky likes, but Koreanspeakers generalized only to new instances ofloose fits. These language-driven differencesradically diminished in the similarity sortingcondition, in which the word (on or nohta)was not invoked; in this case the catego-rization choices of the two language groupswere essentially the same. The “language onlanguage” interpretation we commended indiscussing the object/substance distinctionin this case, too, seems to encompass the

various laboratory effects in dealing withspatial relations.

Motion

Talmy (1985) described two styles ofmotion expression characterizing differentlanguages: Some languages, including En-glish, typically use a verb plus a separatepath expression to describe motion events.In such languages, manner of motion is en-coded in the main verb (e.g., walk, crawl,slide, or float), and path information appearsin nonverbal elements such as particles, ad-verbials, or prepositional phrases (e.g., away,through the forest, out of the room). In Greekor Spanish, the dominant pattern insteadis to include path information within theverb itself (e.g., Greek bjeno, “exit” and beno,“enter”); the manner of motion often goesunmentioned, or appears in gerunds, prepo-sitional phrases, or adverbials (trehontas,“running”). These patterns are not absolute.Greek has motion verbs that express manner,and English has motion verbs that expresspath (enter, exit, cross). But several studieshave shown that children and adults havelearned these dominance patterns. Slobin(1996) showed that child and adult Spanishand English speakers vary in the terms theytypically use to describe the same picture-book stories, with English speakers display-ing greater frequency and diversity of man-ner of motion verbs. Papafragou, Massey,and Gleitman (2002) showed the same ef-fects for the description of motion scenesby Greek- versus English-speaking childrenand, much more strongly, for Greek-versusEnglish-speaking adults.

Do such differences in event encoding af-fect the way speakers think about motionevents? Papafragou et al. (2002) tested theirEnglish- and Greek-speaking subjects on ei-ther memory of path or manner details ofmotion scenes, or categorization of motionevents on the basis of path or manner sim-ilarities. Even though speakers of the twolanguages exhibited an asymmetry in encod-ing manner and path information in theirverbal descriptions, they did not differ interms of classification or memory for path



and manner.6 Similar results have been ob-tained for Spanish vs. English by Gennariet al. (2002). Corroborating evidence alsocomes from studies by Munnich, Landau,and Dosher (2001 ), who compared English,Japanese, and Korean speakers’ naming ofspatial locations and their spatial memoryfor the same set of locations. They foundthat, even in aspects in which languagesdiffered (e.g., encoding spatial contact orsupport), there was no corresponding dif-ference in memory performance across lan-guage groups.

Relatedly, the same set of studies sug-gests that the mental representation of mo-tion and location is independent of linguis-tic naming even within a single language.Papafragou et al. (2002) divided their Eng-lish- and Greek-speaking subjects’ verbal de-scriptions of motion according to whetherthey included a path or manner verb, re-gardless of native language. Although En-glish speakers usually chose manner verbs,sometimes they produced path verbs; theGreek speakers also varied but with the pre-ponderances reversed. It was found that verbchoice did not predict memory for path ormanner aspects of motion scenes, or choiceof path or manner as a basis for catego-rizing motion scenes. In the memory task,subjects who had used a path verb to de-scribe a scene were no more likely to detectlater path changes to that scene than sub-jects who had used a manner verb (and viceversa for manner). In the classification task,subjects were not more likely to name twomotion events they had earlier categorized asmost similar by using the same verb. Namingand cognition, then, are distinct under theseconditions: Even for speakers of a singlelanguage, the linguistic resources mobilizedfor labeling underrepresent the cognitiveresources mobilized for cognitive process-ing (e.g., memorizing, classifying, reason-ing, etc.).

An obvious conclusion from these stud-ies of motion representation is that theconceptual organization of space and mo-tion is robustly independent of language-specific labeling practices. Just as obvious,however, is that specific language usage

influences listeners’ interpretation of thespeaker’s intended meaning if the stimu-lus situation leaves such interpretation unre-solved. In another important demonstrationof this language-on-language effect, Naiglesand Terrazas (1998) asked subjects to de-scribe and categorize videotaped scenes –e.g., of a girl skipping toward a tree. Theyfound that Spanish- and English-speakingadults differed in their preferred interpre-tations of new (nonsense) motion verbs inmanner-biasing (She’s kradding toward thetree or Ella esta mecando hacia el arbol)or path-biasing (She’s kradding the tree orElla esta mecando el arbol) sentence struc-tures. The interpretations were heavily influ-enced by syntactic structure. But judgmentsalso reflected the preponderance of verbs ineach language – Spanish speakers gave morepath interpretations and English speakersgave more manner interpretations. Similareffects of language-specific lexical practiceson presumed word extension have beenfound for adjectives (Waxman, Senghas, &Benveniste, 1997).

A fair conclusion from this and relatedevidence is that verbal descriptions are un-der the control of many factors related toaccessibility, including the simple frequencyof a word’s use, as well as of faithfulness as adescription of the scene. As Slobin has ar-gued persuasively, the dynamic process ofexpressing one’s thoughts is subject to theexigencies of linguistic categories that canvary from language to language. Given theheavy information-processing demands ofrapid conversation, faithfulness often is sac-rificed to accessibility. For these and otherreasons, verbal reports do not come any-where near exhausting the observers’ mentalrepresentations of events. Language use, inthis sense, is “sketchy.” Rather than “think-ing in words,” humans seem to make easylinguistic choices which, for competent lis-teners, serve as rough but usually effectivepointers to those ideas.

Spatial Frames of Reference

Certain linguistic communities (e.g., Tene-japan Mayans) customarily use an externally



referenced (absolute) spatial coordinate sys-tem to refer to nearby directions and po-sitions (“to the north”); others (e.g., Dutchspeakers) use a viewer-perspective (relative)system (“to the left”). Brown and Levinson(1993) and Pederson et al. (1998) recentlysuggested that these linguistic practices af-fect spatial reasoning in language-specificways. In one of their experiments, TenejapanMayan and Dutch subjects were presentedwith an array of objects (toy animals) on atabletop; after a brief delay, subjects weretaken to the opposite side of a new table(they were effectively rotated 1 80 degrees),handed the toys, and asked to reproduce thearray “in the same way as before.” The over-whelming majority of Tenejapan (absolute)speakers rearranged the objects so they wereheading in the same cardinal direction afterrotation, whereas Dutch (relative) speakersmassively preferred to rearrange the objectsin terms of left–right directionality. This co-variation of linguistic terminology and spa-tial reasoning seems to provide compellingevidence for linguistic influences on nonlin-guistic cognition.

As so often is the case in this literature,however, it is quite hard to disentangle causeand effect. For instance, it is possible thatthe Tenejapan and Dutch groups think aboutspace differently because their languagespattern differently; but it is just as possi-ble that the two linguistic–cultural groupsdeveloped different spatial-orientational vo-cabulary to reflect (rather than cause) dif-ferences in their spatial reasoning strate-gies. Li and Gleitman (2002) investigatedthis second position. They noted that ab-solute spatial terminology is widely used inmany English-speaking communities whoseenvironment is geographically constrainedand includes large stable landmarks such asoceans and looming mountains. The abso-lute terms uptown, downtown, and crosstown(referring to North, South, and East–West)are widely used to describe and navigate inthe space of Manhattan Island, Chicagoansregularly make absolute reference to thelake, etc. It is quite possible, then, that thepresence or absence of stable landmark in-formation rather than language spoken in-

fluences the choice of absolute versus spatialcoordinate frameworks. After all, the influ-ence of such landmark information on spa-tial reasoning has been demonstrated withnonlinguistic (rats; Restle, 1957) and prelin-guistic (infants; Acredolo & Evans, 1980) an-imals. To examine this possibility, Li andGleitman replicated Brown and Levinson’srotation task with English speakers, but theymanipulated the presence or absence oflandmark cues in the testing area. The re-sult, just as for the rats and the infants, wasthat English-speaking adults respond abso-lutely in the presence of landmark informa-tion (after rotation, they set up the animalsgoing in the same cardinal direction) and rel-atively when it is withheld (they set up theanimals going in the same relative – left orright – direction).

Flexibility in spatial reasoning in this re-gard should come as little surprise. The abil-ity to navigate in space is hard-wired in thebrain of moving creatures, including beesand ants. For all of these organisms, re-liable orientation and navigation in spaceare crucial for survival (Gallistel, 1990).Accordingly, neurobiological evidence fromhumans and other species that the brainroutinely uses a multiplicity of coordinateframeworks in coding for the position of ob-jects to prepare for directed action (Gallistel,2002). It would be quite amazing if, amongall the creatures that walk, fly, and crawl onthe earth, only humans, by virtue of acquir-ing a particular language, lose the ability touse both absolute and relative spatial coordi-nate frameworks flexibly. The case is by nomeans closed even on this issue, however,because successive probes of the rotationsituation have continued to yield conflict-ing results both within and across languages(e.g., Levinson, Kita, & Haun, 2002 ; Li &Gleitman, in preparation]. One way of rec-onciling these findings and theories has todo with the level of analysis to which theLevinson groups’ findings are thought to ap-ply. Perhaps we are prisoners of languageonly in complex and highly derived tasks andonly when behavior is partly under the con-trol of verbal instructions that include vagueexpressions such as “make it the same.” But



it is fair to say that the jury is still out on thisphenomenon.

Evidentiality

One of Whorf’s most interesting conjecturesconcerned the possible effects of evidentials(linguistic markers of information source) onthe nature of thought. Whorf pointed outthat Hopi – unlike English – marked evi-dential distinctions in its complementizersystem. Comparing the sentences I see thatit is red vs. I see that it is new, he remarked(Whorf, 1956, p. 85):

We fuse two quite different types of rela-tionship into a vague sort of connection ex-pressed by ‘that’, whereas the Hopi indi-cates that in the first case seeing presents asensation ‘red,’ and in the second that see-ing presents unspecified evidence for whichis drawn the inference of newness.

Whorf concluded that this grammaticalfeature was bound to make certain concep-tual distinctions easier to draw for the Hopispeaker because of the force of habitual lin-guistic practices.

Papafragou, Li, and Han (2003) soughtto put this proposal to test. They com-pared English, which mainly marks eviden-tiality lexically: I saw/heard/inferred thatJohn left, with Korean, in which eviden-tiality is encoded through a set of dedi-cated morphemes. Given evidence that suchmorphemes are produced early by childrenlearning Korean (Choi, 1995), they askedwhether Korean children develop the rele-vant conceptual distinctions earlier and withgreater reliability than learners of English,in which evidentiality is not grammaticallyencoded. In a series of experiments, theycompared the acquisition of nonlinguisticdistinctions between sources of evidence inthree- and four-year-olds learning Englishor Korean: No difference in nonlinguisticreasoning in these regards was found be-tween the English and Korean group. Forinstance, children in both linguistic groupswere equally good at reporting how theyfound out about the contents of a con-tainer (e.g., by looking inside or by beingtold); both groups were also able to attribute

knowledge of the contents of a container toa character who had looked inside but notto another character who had had no visualaccess to its content. Furthermore, Koreanlearners were more advanced in their non-linguistic knowledge of sources of informa-tion than in their knowledge of the meaningof linguistic evidentials. In this case, then,learned linguistic categories do not seem toserve as a guide for the individual’s non-linguistic categories in the way that Whorfconjectured. Rather, the acquisition of lin-guistically encoded distinctions seems to fol-low, and build upon, the conceptual un-derstanding of evidential distinctions. Theconceptual understanding itself appears toproceed similarly across diverse language-learning populations.

Time

Thus far, we have focused on grammati-cal and lexical properties of linguistic sys-tems and their possible effects on conceptualstructure. Here we consider another aspectof languages as expressive systems – theirsystematically differing use of certain net-works of metaphor; specifically, metaphorfor talking about time (Boroditsky, 2001 ).English speakers predominantly talk abouttime as if it were horizontal (one pushesdeadlines back, expects good times ahead, ormoves meetings forward), whereas Mandarinspeakers more usually talk about time interms of a vertical axis (they use the Man-darin equivalents of up and down to referto the order of events, weeks, or months).Boroditsky showed that these differencespredict aspects of temporal reasoning byspeakers of these two languages. In one ofher manipulations, subjects were shown twoobjects in vertical arrangement, say, one fishfollowing another one downward, as theyheard something like The black fish is win-ning. After this vertically oriented prime,Mandarin speakers were faster to confirmor disconfirm temporal propositions (e.g.,March comes earlier than April ) than if theywere shown the fish in a horizontal array.The reverse was true for English speakers.Boroditsky concluded that spatiotemporal



metaphors in language affect how peoplereason about time. She has suggested, moregenerally, that such systematic linguisticmetaphors are important in shaping habit-ual patterns of thought.

However, these results are again morecomplex than they seem at first glance. Forone thing, and as Boroditsky acknowledges,vertical metaphors of time are by no meansabsent from ordinary English speech (e.g., Ihave a deadline coming up) although they aremore sporadic than in Mandarin. So again wehave a cross-linguistic difference of degree,rather than a principled opposition. More-over, Boroditsky briefly trained her English-speaking subjects to think about time ver-tically, as in Mandarin. After such training,the English speakers exhibited the vertical(rather than the former horizontal) primingeffect. Apparently, fifteen minutes of train-ing on the vertical overcame and completelyreversed twenty-plus years of the habitualuse of the horizontal in these speakers. Theeffects of metaphor, it seems, are transientand fluid, without long-term influence onthe nature of conceptualization or its im-plicit deployment to evaluate propositionsin real time.

Number

Prelinguistic infants and nonhuman pri-mates share an ability to represent both ex-act numerosities for very small sets (roughlyup to three objects) and approximate nu-merosities for larger sets (Dehaene, 1997).Human adults possess a third system for rep-resenting number that allows for the rep-resentation of exact numerosities for largesets; in principle has no upper bound on setsize; and can support the comparison of nu-merosities of different sets as well as pro-cesses of addition and subtraction. Crucially,this system is generative because it possessesa rule for creating successive integers (thesuccessor function) and therefore is charac-terized by discrete infinity (see Gallistel &Gelman, Chap. 23).

How do young children become capa-ble of using this uniquely human numbersystem? One powerful answer is that the ba-

sic principles underlying the adult numbersystem are innate; gaining access to theseprinciples gives children a way of grasp-ing the infinitely discrete nature of natu-ral numbers, as manifested by their abilityto use verbal counting (Gelman & Gallistel,1978; Gallistel & Gelman, Chap. 23). Otherresearchers propose that children come toacquire the adult number system by con-joining properties of the two prelinguisticnumber systems via natural language. Specif-ically, they propose that grasping the lin-guistic properties of number words (e.g.,their role in verbal counting or their seman-tic relations to quantifiers such as few, all,many, most; see Spelke & Tsivkin, 2001a andBloom, 1994b; Carey, 2001 respectively) en-ables children to put together elements ofthe two previously available number sys-tems to create a new, generative number fac-ulty. In Bloom’s (1994b, p. 1 86] words, “inthe course of development, children ‘boot-strap’ a generative understanding of num-ber out of the productive syntactic andmorphological structures available in thecounting system.”

Upon hearing the number words in acounting context, for instance, children re-alize that these words map onto bothspecific representations delivered by theexact-numerosities calculator and inexactrepresentations delivered by the approxima-tor device. By conjoining properties of thesetwo systems, children gain insight into theproperties of the adult conception of num-ber (e.g., that each of the number wordspicks out an exact set of entities, that addingor subtracting exactly one object changesnumber, etc.). Ultimately, it is hypothesizedthat this process enables the child to com-pute exact numerosities even for large sets(such as seven or twenty-three) – an abilitynot afforded by either of the prelinguisticcalculation systems.

Spelke and Tsivkin (2001a, b) experi-mentally investigated the thesis that lan-guage contributes to exact large-number cal-culations. In their studies, bilinguals whowere trained on arithmetic problems in asingle language and later tested on themwere faster on large-number arithmetic if



tested in the training language; however, nosuch advantage of the training language ap-peared with estimation problems. The con-clusion from this and related experimentswas that the particular natural language isthe vehicle of thought concerning large ex-act numbers but not about approximate nu-merosities. Such findings, as Spelke and hercollaborators have emphasized, can be partof the explanation of the special “smartness”of humans. Higher animals, like humans, canreason to some degree about approximatenumerosity, but not about exact numbers.Beyond this shared core knowledge, how-ever, humans have language. If language isa required causal factor in exact numberknowledge, in principle this could explainthe gulf between creatures like us and crea-tures like them.

How plausible is the view that theadult number faculty presupposes linguis-tic mediation? Recall that, on this view,children infer the generative structure ofnumber from the generative structure ofgrammar when they hear others count-ing. However, counting systems vary cross-linguistically, and in a language like English,their recursive properties are not really ob-vious from the outset. Specifically, untilnumber eleven, the English counting sys-tem presents no evidence of regularity, muchless of generativity: A child hearing one, two,three, four, five, six, up to eleven, would haveno reason to assume – based on propertiesof form – that the corresponding numbersare lawfully related (namely, that they suc-cessively increase by one). For larger num-bers, the system is more regular, even thoughnot fully recursive because of the presenceof several idiosyncratic features (e.g., onecan say eighteen or nineteen but not tenteenfor twenty). In sum, it is not so clear howthe “productive syntactic and morphologicalstructures available in the counting system”will provide systematic examples of discreteinfinity that can then be imported into num-ber cognition (see Grinstead et al., 2003 , fordetailed discussion).

Can properties of other natural languageexpressions bootstrap a generative under-

standing of number? Quantifiers have beenproposed as a possible candidate (Carey,2001 ). However, familiar quantifiers lack thehallmark properties of the number system:They are not strictly ordered with respect toone another and their generation is not gov-erned by the successor function. In fact, sev-eral quantifiers presuppose the computationof cardinality of sets – e.g., neither and bothapply only to sets of two items (Keenan &Stavi, 1986; Barwise & Cooper, 1981 ). More-over, quantifiers compose in quite differentways from numbers. For example, the ex-pression most men and women cannot be in-terpreted to mean a large majority of themen and much less than half the women (A.Joshi, personal communication). In light ofthe semantic disparities between the quanti-fier and integer systems, it is hard to see howit is possible to bootstrap the semantics ofone from the other.

Recent experimental findings suggest,moreover, that young children understandcertain semantic properties of numberwords well before they know those of quan-tifiers. One case involves the scalar interpre-tation of these terms. In one experiment,Papafragou and Musolino (2003) had five-year-old children watch as three horses areshown jumping over a fence. The childrenwill not accept Two of the horses jumped overthe fence as an adequate description of thatevent (even though it is necessarily true thatif three horses jumped, then certainly twodid). But at the same age, they will acceptSome of the horses jumped over the fence as anadequate description even though it is truethat all of the horses jumped. In another ex-periment, Hurewitz, Papafragou, Gleitman,and Gelman (in preparation) found thatthree-year-olds understand certain semanticproperties of number words such as two andfour well before they know those of quan-tifiers such as some and all. It seems, then,that the linguistic systems of number andnatural-language quantification are develop-ing rather independently. If anything, thechildren seem more advanced in knowledgeof the meaning of number words than quan-tifiers so it is hard to see how the semantics of



the former lexical type is to be bootstrappedfrom the semantics of the latter.

Orientation

A final domain we discuss is spatial orienta-tion. Cheng and Gallistel [1984) found thatrats rely on geometric information to reori-ent themselves in a rectangular space, andseem incapable of integrating geometricalwith nongeometrical properties (e.g., color,smell, etc.) in searching for a hidden object.If they see food hidden at the corner of a longand a short wall, they will search equally ateither of the two such walls of a rectangularspace after disorientation; this is true even ifthese corners are distinguishable by one ofthe long walls being painted blue or having aspecial smell, etc. Hermer and Spelke (1994 ,1996] reported a very similar difficulty inyoung children. Both animals and youngchildren can navigate and reorient by the useof either geometric or nongeometric cues;it is integrating across the cue types thatcreates trouble. These difficulties are over-come by older children and adults, who areable, for instance, to go straight to the cornerformed by a long wall to the left and a shortblue wall to the right. Hermer and Spelkefound that success in these tasks was signifi-cantly predicted by the spontaneous combi-nation of spatial vocabulary and object prop-erties such as color within a single phrase(e.g., to the left of the blue wall ).7 Later exper-iments (Hermer-Vasquez, Spelke, and Kat-snelson, 1999) revealed that adults who wereasked to shadow speech had more difficultyin these orientation tasks than adults whowere asked to shadow a rhythm with theirhands; however, verbal shadowing did notdisrupt subjects’ performance in tasks thatrequired the use of nongeometric informa-tion only. The conclusion was that speech-shadowing, unlike rhythm-shadowing, bytaking up linguistic resources, blocked theintegration of geometrical and object prop-erties, which is required to solve complexorientation tasks. In short, success at the taskseems to require encoding of the relevantterms in a specifically linguistic format.

In a recent review article, Carruthers(2002) suggests even more strongly that innumber, space, and perhaps other domains,language is the medium of intermodularcommunication, a format in which repre-sentations from different domains can becombined to create novel concepts. In stan-dard assumptions about modularity, how-ever, modules are characterized as compu-tational systems with their own proprietaryvocabulary and combinatorial rules. Becauselanguage itself is a module in this sense,its computations and properties (e.g., gen-erativity, compositionality) cannot be trans-ferred to other modules because they aredefined over – and can only apply to –language-internal representations. One wayout of this conundrum is to give up the as-sumption that language is – on the appropri-ate level – modular:

Language may serve as a mediumfor this conjunction . . . because it is adomain-general, combinatorial system towhich the representations delivered by thechild’s . . . [domain-specific] nonverbal sys-tems can be mapped. (Spelke & Tsivkin,2 001 b, p. 84).

Language is constitutively involved in(some kinds of) human thinking. Specifi-cally, language is the vehicle of nonmodu-lar, nondomain-specific, conceptual think-ing which integrates the results of modularthinking (Carruthers, 2 002 , p. 666).

On this view, the output of the linguisticsystem just is Mentalese: There is no otherlevel of representation in which the infor-mation to the left of the blue wall can be en-tertained. This picture of language is novelin many respects. In the first place, replac-ing Mentalese with a linguistic representa-tion challenges existing theories of languageproduction and comprehension. Tradition-ally, and as discussed earlier, it is assumedthe production of sentences begins by en-tertaining the corresponding thought, whichthen mobilizes the appropriate linguistic re-sources for its expression (e.g., Levelt, 1989).On recent proposals, however (Carruthers,2002 , p. 668):



We cannot accept that the production of asentence ‘The toy is to the left of the bluewall’ begins with a tokening of the thoughtTHE TOY IS TO THE LEFT OF THEBLUE WALL (in Mentalese), since our hy-pothesis is that such a thought cannot beentertained independently of being framedin a natural language

Inversely, language comprehension clas-sically is taken to unpack linguistic repre-sentations into mental representations thatthen can trigger further inferences. But inCarruthers’ proposal, after hearing The toyis to the left of the blue wall, the interpretivedevice cannot decode the message into thecorresponding thought because there is nolevel of Mentalese independent of languagein which the constituents are lawfully con-nected to each other. Interpretation can onlydismantle the utterance and send its con-cepts back to the geometric and landmarkmodules to be processed. In this sense, un-derstanding an utterance such as The pictureis to the right of the red wall turns out to bea very different process than understandingsuperficially similar utterances such as Thepicture is to the right of the wall, or The pic-ture is on the red wall, which do not, on thisaccount, require cross-domain integration.

Furthermore, if language is to serve as adomain for cross-module integration, thenthe lexical resources of each language be-come crucial for conceptual combination.Lexical gaps in the language will block con-ceptual integration, for instance, becausethere would be no relevant words to insertinto the linguistic string. We know that colorterms vary across languages (Kay & Regier,2002); more relevantly, not all languageshave terms for left and right (Levinson,1996). It follows that speakers of these lan-guages should fail to combine geometric andobject properties in the same way as do En-glish speakers to recover from disorientation.In other words, depending on the spatial vo-cabulary available in their language, disori-ented adults may behave either like Spelkeand Tsivkin’s English-speaking populationor like prelinguistic infants and rats. Thisprediction, although merely carrying theoriginal proposal to its apparent logical con-

clusion, is quite radical: It allows a strikingdiscontinuity among members of the humanspecies, contingent not upon the presence orabsence of human language and its combi-natorial powers (as the original experimentsseem to suggest) or even upon cultural andeducational differences, but on vagaries ofthe lexicon in individual linguistic systems.

Despite its radical entailments, there is asense in which Spelke’s proposal to inter-pret concept configurations on the basis ofthe combinatorics of natural language can beconstrued as decidedly nativist. In fact, we soconstrue it. Spelke’s proposal requires thathumans be equipped with the ability to con-struct novel structured syntactic represen-tations, insert lexical concepts at the termi-nal nodes of such representations (left, blue,etc.), and interpret the outcome on the basisof familiar rules of semantic composition (tothe left of the blue wall). In other words, hu-mans are granted principled knowledge ofhow phrasal meaning is to be determinedby lexical units and the way they are com-posed into structured configurations. Thatis, what is granted is the ability to read thesemantics off of phrase structure trees. Fur-ther, the assumption is that this knowledgeis not attained through learning but belongsto the in-built properties of the human lan-guage device. But notice that granting hu-mans the core ability to build and interpretphrase structures is already granting themquite a lot. Exactly these presuppositionshave been the hallmark of the nativist pro-gram in linguistics and language acquisition(Chomsky, 1957; Pinker, 1984 ; Gleitman,1990; Lidz, Gleitman, & Gleitman, 2002 ;Jackendoff, 1990) and the target of vigorousdissent elsewhere (Tomasello, 2000; Gold-berg, 1995). To the extent that Spelke andTsivkin’s arguments about language and cog-nition rely on the combinatorial and genera-tive powers of language, they already makequite deep commitments to abstract (andunlearnable) syntactic principles and theirsemantic reflexes. Notice in this regard thatbecause these authors hold that any naturallanguage will serve as the source and vehi-cle for the required inferences, the princi-ples at work here must be abstract enough



to wash out the diverse surface-structuralrealizations of to the left of the blue wall inthe languages of the world. Independentlyof particular experiences, an organism withsuch principles in place could – generate andsystematically comprehend novel linguisticstrings with meanings predictable from theinternal organization of those strings – and,for different but related reasons, just as sys-tematically fail to understand other stringssuch as to the left of the blue idea. We wouldbe among the last to deny such a proposal inits general form. We agree that there are uni-versal aspects of the syntax–semantics inter-face. Whether these derive from or augmentthe combinatorial powers of thought is thequestion at issue here. For the present com-mentators, it is hard to see how shifting theburden of the acquisition of compositionalsemantics from the conceptual system to thelinguistic system diminishes the radical na-tivist flavor of the position.

Conclusions and Future Directions

We have just tried to review the burgeoningpsychological and anthropological literaturethat attempts to relate language to thought.We began with the many difficulties in-volved in radical versions of the linguistic rel-ativity position, including the fact that lan-guage seems to underspecify thought and todiverge from it regarding the treatment ofambiguity, paraphrase, and deictic reference.Moreover, there is ample evidence that sev-eral forms of cognitive organization are in-dependent of language: Infants who have nolanguage are able to entertain relatively com-plex thoughts; for that matter, they can learnlanguages or even invent them when theneed arises (Goldin-Meadow, 2003 ; Senghaset al., 1997). Many bilinguals, as a mat-ter of course, “code-switch” between theirknown languages even during the utteranceof a single sentence (Joshi, 1985). Aphasicssometimes exhibit impressive propositionalthinking (Varley & Siegal, 2000). Animalscan form representations of space, artifacts,and perhaps even mental states without

linguistic crutches (Hauser & Carey, 1998;Gallistel, 1990; Hare, Call, & Tomasello,2001 ; and Call & Tomasello, Chap. 25). Inlight of all these language–thought dispari-ties, it would seem perverse to take an equa-tive position on relations between the two.

At the same time, compelling experi-mental studies again and again documentintimate, seemingly organic, relationshipsamong language, thought, and culture, ofmuch the kind that Whorf and Sapir drewout of their field experiences. What is toexplain these deep correlations betweenculturally divergent ways of thinking andculturally divergent ways of talking? In cer-tain cases, we argued that cause and effecthad simply been prematurely placed on onefoot or another because of the crudenessof our investigative tools. Inconvenientlyenough, it is often hard to study languagedevelopment apart from conceptual andcultural learning or to devise experiments inwhich these factors can be prevented frominteracting, so it is hard to argue back toorigins. On the other hand, the difficultyof even engineering such language–thoughtdissociations in the laboratory is one signifi-cant point in favor of a linguistic–relativisticview. Why should it be so hard to pry themapart if they are so separate?

Over the course of the discussion, ourreading of the evidence put us close to whatwe take to be the “typological bootstrap-ping” and “thinking for speaking” positionsarticulated in various places by Slobin [1996;2001 ; 2003 , inter alia]. Language influencesthought “on line” and in many ways. Forthe learner, the particular speech events thatone experiences can and do provide cuesto nonlinguistic categorization – i.e., a newlinguistic label “invites” the learner to at-tend to certain types of classification crite-ria over others. Markman and Hutchinson(1984) found that if one shows a two-year-old a new object and says See this one; findanother one, the child typically reaches forsomething that has a spatial or encyclopedicrelation to the original object (e.g., finding abone to go with the dog). But if one uses anew word (See this fendle, find another fendle),the child typically looks for something from



the same category (e.g., finding another dogto go with the first dog). Similar effects havebeen obtained with much younger children:Balaban and Waxman (1997) showed thatlabeling can facilitate categorization in in-fants as young as nine months (cf. Xu, 2002).Beyond categorization, labeling has beenshown to guide infants’ inductive inference(e.g., expectations about nonobvious proper-ties of novel objects), even more so than per-ceptual similarity (Welder & Graham, 2001 ).Other recent experimentation shows that la-beling may help children solve spatial tasksby pointing to specific systems of spatial re-lations (Loewenstein & Gentner, 2003). Forlearners, then, the presence of linguistic la-bels constrains criteria for categorization andserves to foreground a codable category outof all the possible categories to which a stim-ulus could be said to belong.

To what extent these linguistic influencesresult in mere tweaks – slight shifts in theboundaries between categories – or to moreradical reorganizations of the learners’ con-ceptual world (as in the reorganizationalprinciples that stand between phonetics andphonology) is hard to say at the presenttime. For competent adult users, thinking forspeaking effects arise again to coax the lis-tener toward certain interpretations of thespeech he or she is hearing as a functionof probabilistic features of a particular lan-guage. The clearest example in the analy-sis we presented is the series of inferencesthat lead to different cross-linguistic catego-rizations of novel not-clearly-individuatablestimulus items with nonsense names: If it isan English noun, it is probably an Englishcount-noun; if it is an English count-noun, itis probably naming an individuatable object.

It appears to us that much discussionabout the relationship between language andthought has been colored by an underlyingdisagreement about the nature of languageitself. Many commentators, struck by ob-served cross-linguistic diversity in semanticand syntactic categories, have taken this di-versity as a possible source of deeper cogni-tive discontinuities among speakers of dif-ferent languages. But other commentatorssee this cross-linguistic diversity as much

more limited and superficial than the bloom-ing, buzzing confusion coming out of thetower of Babel. For instance, many stud-ies in morphosyntax show that apparentlydistinct surface configurations of linguisticelements in different languages can be ana-lyzed in terms of underlying structural simi-larities (Chomsky, 2000; Baker, 2001 ). Stud-ies in linguistic semantics suggest that theproperties and meanings of syntactic entities(e.g., determiners) are severely constrainedcross-linguistically (Keenan & Stavi, 1986).Many of these principles of language organi-zation seem to map quite transparently fromcore knowledge of the kinds studied in in-fants (e.g., Quinn, 2001 ; Baillargeon, 1993 ;and other sources mentioned throughout).For instance, scenes of kangaroos jumpingcome apart into the kangaroo (argument)part and jumping (predicate) part in everynatural language, but also in the prelinguis-tic parsing of events by children, includingthose learning language under circumstancesof extreme linguistic and sensory deprivation(e.g., blind or isolated deaf children: Goldin-Meadow, 2003 ; Landau & Gleitman, 1985 ;Senghas et al., 1997). Focus on this kindof evidence suggests that cross-linguistic di-versity is highly constrained by rich anddeep underlying similarities in the nature ofthought. Thus, rather than pointing to cogni-tive discontinuities among speakers of differ-ent languages, cross-linguistic diversity couldreveal principled points of departure froman otherwise common linguistic–conceptualblueprint humans share as a consequence oftheir biological endowment.

Acknowledgments

We thank Jerry Fodor for a discussion ofthe semantics of raining, Ray Jackendofffor a discussion of phonology, as well asDan Slobin and Dedre Gentner for theircomments on this chapter. Much of ourperspective derives from our collaborativework with Cynthia Fisher, Henry Gleitman,Christine Massey, Kimberly Cassidy, JeffLidz, Peggy Li, and Barbara Landau. Writing



of this chapter was supported by NIHgrant #1 -R01 -HD37507-02 to J. Trueswelland L. R. Gleitman and NIH grant#1F32MH65020-01A2 to A. Papafragou.

Notes

1 . In one experimental demonstration, subjectswere asked: When an airplane crashes, whereshould the survivors be buried? They rarely no-ticed the meaning discrepancy in the question(Barton & Sanford, 1996).

2 . The similarity test may not be decisive for thiscase, as Malt, Sloman, and Gennari (2003), aswell as Smith, Colunga, and Yoshida (2001 ),among others, have pointed out. Similarityjudgments applied as the measuring instru-ment could systematically mas various non-perceptual determinants of organization ina semantic–conceptual domain, some poten-tially language-caused. Over the course of thischapter, we will return to consider other do-mains and other psychological measures. Forfurther discussion of the sometimes arbitraryand linguistically varying nature of the lexi-con, even in languages that are typologicallyand historically closely related, see Kay (1996).He points out, for example, that English speak-ers use screwdriver while the Germans useSchraubenzieher (literally, “screwpuller”), andthe French tournevise (literally, “screwturner”)for the same purposes; our Turnpike exit–entrypoints are marked exit whereas the Brazilianshave entradas; and so forth.

3 . Categorical perception for speech sounds hasbeen documented for other species, includ-ing chinchillas and macaques (e.g., Kuhl &Miller, 1978). Moreover, studies from Kay andKempton (1984), and Roberson, Davies, andDavidoff (2000) suggest that even for hueperception, the relationship between linguis-tic and perceptual categorization is not soclear, with categorical perception effects ob-tained or not obtained depending on verydelicate choices of experimental procedureand particular characteristics of the stimulus.For an important review, see Munnich andLandau (2003).

4 . This argument is not easy. One might arguethat English is a classifier language much likeYucatec Mayan or Japanese – i.e., that all itswords start out as mass nouns and become

countable entities only through adding theclassifiers the and a (compare brick the sub-stance to a brick, the object). Detailed linguis-tic analysis, however, suggests there is a gen-uine typological difference here (Slobin, 2001

and Lucy & Gaskins, 2001 ., Chierchia, 1998,Krifka, 1995 , for discussion). The question iswhether, because all languages formally markthe mass or count distinction in one way oranother, the difference in particular linguis-tic means could plausibly rebound to impactontology.

5 . We should point out that this hint, at best, is aweak one, another reason why the observedinterpretive difference for Japanese and En-glish speakers, even at the perceptual midline,is also weak. Notoriously, English often violatesthe semantic generalization linking mass nounmorphology with substancehood (compare,for example, footwear, silverware, furniture).

6. Subsequent analysis of the linguistic data re-vealed that Greek speakers were more likelyto include manner of motion in their ver-bal descriptions when manner was unexpectedor noninferable, whereas English speakers in-cluded manner information regardless of in-ferability (Papafragou, Massey, & Gleitman,2003). This suggests that speakers may mon-itor harder-to-encode event components andchoose to include them in their utteranceswhen especially informative. This finding rein-forces the conclusion that verbally encoded as-pects of events vastly underdetermine the sub-tleties of event cognition.

7. Further studies show that success in this taskamong young children is sensitive to the sizeof the room: In a large room, more four-year-olds succeed in combining geometric and land-mark information (Learmonth, Nadel, & New-combe, in press). Moreover, it is claimed thatother species (chickens, monkeys) can use bothtypes of information when disoriented (Val-lortigara, Zanforlin, & Pasti, 1990; Gouteux,Thinus-Blanc, & Vauclair, in press). For discus-sion, see Carruthers (2002).

References

Acredolo, L., & Evans, D. (1980). Developmentalchanges in the effects of landmarks on infantspatial behavior. Developmental Psychology, 1 6,31 2–318.



Baillargeon, R. (1993). The object conceptrevisited: New directions in the investigation ofinfants’ physical knowledge. In C. E. Granrud(Ed.), Carnegie Mellon Symposia on Cognition,Vol. 2 3 : Visual Perception and Cognition in In-fancy (pp. 265–315). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Baker, M. (2001 ). The Atoms of Language. NewYork: Basic Books.

Balaban, M. T., & Waxman, S. R. (1997). Dowords facilitate object categorization in 9-month-old infants? Journal of ExperimentalChild Psychology, 64 , 3–26.

Barton, S. B., & Sanford, A. J. (1993). A casestudy of anomaly detection: Shallow semanticprocessing and cohesion establishment. Mem-ory and Cognition, 2 1 , 477–487.

Barwise, J., & Cooper, R. (1981 ). Generalizedquantifiers and natural language. Linguistics andPhilosophy, 4 , 1 59–219.

Berlin, B., & Kay, P. (1969). Basic Color Terms:Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: Uni-versity of California Press.

Best, C., McRoberts, G., & Sithole, N. (1988).The phonological basis of perceptual loss fornon-native contrasts: Maintenance of discrim-ination among Zulu clicks by English-speakingadults and infants. Journal of ExperimentalPsychology: Human Perception and Performance,1 4 , 345–360.

Bloch, B., & Trager, G. L. (1942). Outline of Lin-guistic Analysis. Baltimore: Waverly Press.

Bloom, P. (1994a). Possible names: The role ofsyntax-semantics mappings in the acquisitionof nominals. Lingua, 92 , 297–329.

Bloom, P. (1994b). Generativity within languageand other cognitive domains. Cognition, 51 ,1 77–1 89.

Bloom, P. (2000). How Children Learn the Mean-ing of Words. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Boroditsky, L. (2001 ). Does language shapethought?: Mandarin and English speakers’ con-ception of time. Cognitive Psychology, 43 , 1–22 .

Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2001 ). Shaping mean-ings for language: Universal and language-specific in the acquisition of spatial semanticcategories. In M. Bowerman, & S. C. Levin-son (Eds.), Language Acquisition and Concep-tual Development (pp. 475–51 1 ). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Bowerman, M., & Levinson, S. C. (Eds.) (2001 ).Language Acquisition and Conceptual Develop-ment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bowerman, M. (1996). The origins of children’sspatial semantic categories: Cognitive versus

linguistic determinants. In J. Gumperz, & S. C.Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity(pp. 1 45–1 76). Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Bowerman, M., & Levinson, S. C. (2001 ). Intro-duction. In M. Bowerman and S. C. Levinson(Eds.), Language Acquisition and ConceptualDevelopment (pp. 1–16). Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1993). “Uphill” and“downhill” in Tzeltal. Journal of Linguistic An-thropology, 3 , 46–74 .

Brown, R. (1957). Linguistic determinism and theparts of speech. Journal of Abnormal and SocialPsychology, 55 , 1–5 .

Brown, R., & Lenneberg, E. (1954). A study oflanguage and cognition. Journal of Abnormaland Social Psychology, 49, 454–462 .

Carey, S. (1982). The child as word learner. In M.Halle, J. Bresnan, & G. Miller (Eds.), LinguisticTheory and Psychological Reality (pp. 264–293).Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Carey, S. (2001 ). Whorf versus continuitytheorists: Bringing data to bear on the debate.In M. Bowerman, & S. Levinson (Eds.), Lan-guage Acquisition and Conceptual Development(pp. 1 85–214). Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Carruthers, P. (2002). The cognitive functionsof language. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2 5 ,657–674 .

Cheng, K., & Gallistel, C. R. (1984). Testing thegeometric power of an animal’s spatial repre-sentation. In H. Roitblat, T. G. Bever, & H. Ter-race (Eds.), Animal Cognition (pp. 409–423).Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Chierchia, G. (1998). Reference to kinds acrosslanguages. Natural Language Semantics, 6,339–405 .

Choi, S., & Bowerman, M. (1991 ). Learning toexpress motion events in English and Korean:The influence of language-specific lexicaliza-tion patterns. Cognition, 41 , 83–1 21 .

Choi, S. (1995). The development of epistemicsentence-ending modal forms and functions inKorean children. In J. Bybee, & S. Fleischman(Eds.), Modality in Grammar and Discourse(pp. 165–204). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic Structures. TheHague: Mouton.

Chomsky, N. (1964) Current Issues in LinguisticTheory. The Hague: Mouton.

Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the Theory of Syn-tax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.



Chomsky, N. (1975). Reflections on Language.New York: Pantheon.

Chomsky, N, (2000). New Horizons in the Studyof Language and Mind. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Clark, H. (1992). Arenas of Language Use.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Dehaene, S. (1997). The Number Sense. NewYork: Oxford University Press.

Dell, G. (1995). Speaking and mispeaking. In L.Gleitman, & M. Liberman (Eds.), Language: AnInvitation to Cognitive Science, (pp. 1 83–208).Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Descartes, R. (1662). Trait de l’homme. E. S. Hal-dane, & G. R. T. Ross (Trans). Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Eimas, P., Siqueland, E., Jusczyk, P., & Vigorito,J. (1971 ). Speech perception in infants. Science,1 71 , 303–306.

Fisher, C. (1996). Structural limits on verbmapping: The role of analogy in children’s in-terpretations of sentences. Cognitive Psychol-ogy, 31 , 41–81 .

Fisher, C., & Gleitman, L. R. (2002). Breakingthe linguistic code: Current issues in early lan-guage learning. In H. F. Pashler (series Ed.), &R. Gallistel (vol. Ed.), Steven’s Handbook of Ex-perimental Psychology, Vol. 1 : Learning and mo-tivation (3 rd ed.). New York: Wiley.

Fodor, J. (1975). The Language of Thought. NewYork: Crowell.

Gallistel, C. R., & Gelman, R. (1992). Preverbaland verbal counting and computation. Cogni-tion, 44 , 43–74 .

Gallistel, R. (1990). The Organization of Learning.Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gallistel, R. (2002). Language and spatial framesof reference in mind and brain. Trends in Cog-nitive Science, 6, 321–322 .

Gelman, R., & Spelke, E. (1981 ). The devel-opment of thoughts about animate and inan-imate objects: Implications for research onsocial cognition. In J. H. Flavell, & L. Ross(Eds.), Social Cognitive Development: Frontiersand Possible Futures (pp. 43–66). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Gennari, S., Sloman, S., Malt, B., & Fitch, W.(2002). Motion events in language and cogni-tion. Cognition, 83 , 49–79.

Gentner, D., & Boroditksy, L. (2001 ). Individua-tion, relativity and early word learning. In M.Bowerman, & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language Ac-quisition and Conceptual Development (pp. 21 5–256). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gentner, D., & Goldin-Meadow, S., (Eds.)(2003). Language in Mind: Advances in theStudy of Language and Thought. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources ofverb meaning. Language Acquisition, 1 , 1–55 .

Gleitman, L., & Rozin P. (1977). The structureand acquisition of reading I: Relations betweenorthographies and the structure of language. InA. Reber, & D. Scarborough (eds.), Toward aPsychology of Reading. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Goldberg, A. (1995). Constructions: A Construc-tion Grammar Approach to Argument Structure.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldin-Meadow, S. (2003). Thought beforelanguage: Do we think ergative? In D. Gentner,& S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language in Mind:Advances in the Study of Language and Thought,(pp. 493–522). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Gouteux, S., Thinus-Blanc, C., & Vauclair, S.(in press). Rhesus monkeys use geometric andnon-geometric information during a reorienta-tion task. Journal of Experimental Psychology:Gen. Proc., 1 30, 505–519.

Grice, P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P.Cole, & J. Morgan (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics,Vol. 3 : Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press.

Grinstead, J., MacSwan, J., Curtiss, S., & Gelman,R. (2003). (under review) The independenceof language and number. Ms.

Gumperz, J., & Levinson, S., (Eds.) (1996). Re-thinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press.

Hare, B., Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2001 ). Dochimpanzees know what conspecifics know?Animal Behaviour, 61 , 1 39–1 5 1 .

Hauser, M., & Carey, S. (1998). Building a cog-nitive creature from a set of primitives. InD. Cummins, & C. Allen (Eds.), The Evo-lution of Mind. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress.

Heider, E., & Oliver, D. C. (1972). The structureof color space in naming and memory for twolanguages. Cognitive Psychology, 3 , 337–354 .

Hermer, L., & Spelke, E. (1994). A geometricprocess for spatial representation in young chil-dren. Nature, 370, 57–59.

Hermer, L., & Spelke, E. (1996). Modularity anddevelopment: The case of spatial reorientation.Cognition, 61 , 195–232 .

Hermer-Vasquez, L., Spelke, E., & Katsnelson,A. (1999). Sources of flexibility in humancognition: Dual-task studies of space and lan-guage. Cognitive Psychology, 39, 3–36.



Hespos, S., & Spelke, E. (2000). Conceptual pre-cursors to spatial language: Categories of con-tainment. Paper presented at the Meeting ofthe International Society on Infant Studies.Brighton, UK.

Hume, D. (1 739). D. F. Norton, & M. Norton,(Ed.). A Treatise on Human Nature. New York:Oxford University Press, 2000.

Hurewitz, F., Papafragou, A., Gleitman, L., &Gelman, R. (in prep.). The acquisition of num-bers and quantifiers. Rutgers University & Uni-versity of Pennsylvania ms.

Imai, M., & Mazuka, R. (1997). A crosslinguisticstudy on the construal of individuation in lin-guistic and non-linguistic contexts. Paper pre-sented at the Biannual Meeting of the Societyfor Research in Child Development. Washing-ton, DC.

Imai, M. (2000). Universal ontological knowl-edge and a bias toward language-specific cat-egories in the construal of individuation. In S.Niemeier, & R. Dirven (Eds.), Evidence for Lin-guistic Relativity (pp. 1 39–160). Amsterdam:Benjamins.

Imai, M., & Gentner, D. (1997). A crosslinguis-tic study of early word meaning: Universal on-tology and linguistic influence. Cognition, 62 ,169–200.

Imai, M., Gentner, D., & Uchida, N. (1994). Chil-dren’s theories of word meaning: The role ofshape similarity in early acquisition. CognitiveDevelopment, 9, 45–76.

Jackendoff, R. (1990). Semantic Structures. Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press.

Jameson, D., & Hurwich, L. M. (1978). Dichro-matic color language: “reds” and “greens” do notlook alike but their colors do. Sensory Processes,2 , 1 46–1 55 .

Joshi, A. (1985). How much context-sensitivity isnecessary for assigning structural descriptions:Tree adjoining grammars. In D. Dowty, L.Karttunen, & A. Zwicky (Eds.), Natural Lan-guage Parsing. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-sity Press.

Jusczyk, P. (1985). On characterizing the devel-opment of speech perception. In J. Mehler, &R. Fox (Eds.), Neonate Cognition: Beyond theBlooming Buzzing Confusion. Hillsdale, NJ:Erlbaum.

Kay, P. & Regier, T. (2002). Resolving the ques-tion of color naming universals. Proceedingsof the National Academy of Sciences, 1 00(1 5),9085–9089.

Kay, P. (1996). Intra-speaker relativity. In J.Gumperz, & S. Levinson (Eds.), RethinkingLinguistic Relativity (pp. 97–1 1 4). Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Kay, P., & Kempton, W. (1984). What is theSapir-Whorf hypothesis? American Anthropol-ogist, 86, 65–79.

Keenan, E., & Stavi, J. (1986). A semantic charac-terization of natural language determiners. Lin-guistics and Philosophy, 9, 253–326.

Keller, H. (1955). Teacher: Anne Sullivan Macy.Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Kellman, P. (1996). The origins of object percep-tion. In R. Gelman, & T. Au (Eds.), Percep-tual and Cognitive Development (pp. 3–48). SanDiego: Academic Press.

Krifka, M. (1995). Common nouns: A contrastiveanalysis of Chinese and English. In G. Carl-son, & F. J. Pelletier (Eds.), The Generic Book(pp. 398–41 1 ). Chicago & London: Universityof Chicago Press.

Kuhl, P. K., & Miller, J. D. (1978). Speech percep-tion by the chinchilla: Identification functionsfor synthetic VOT stimuli. Journal of the Acous-tical Society of America, 63 , 905–917.

Kuhl, P., Williams, K., Lacerda, F., Stevens, K.,& Lindblom, B. (1992). Linguistic experiencealters phonetic perception in infants by sixmonths of age. Science, 2 55 , 606–608.

Landau, B., & Gleitman, L. (1985). Language andExperience: Evidence from the Blind Child. Cam-bridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Landau, B., Smith, L., & Jones, S. (1998). Theimportance of shape in early lexical learning.Cognitive Development, 3 , 299–321 .

Learmonth, A., Nadel, L., & Newcombe, N.(in press). Children’s use of landmarks: Im-plications for modularity theory. PsychologicalScience.

Leslie, A., & Keeble, S. (1987). Do six-month-old infants perceive causality? Cognition, 2 5 ,265–288.

Levelt, W. (1989). Speaking: From Intention to Ar-ticulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Levinson, S. C. (1996). Frames of reference andMolyneux’s question: Crosslinguistic evidence.In P. Bloom, M.,Oederson, L. Nadel & M.Garrett, Language and Space (pp. 109–169).Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Levinson, S. C., Kita, S., & Haun, D. (2002). Re-turning the tables: Language affects spatial rea-soning. Cognition, 84 , 1 55–1 88.



Li, P. & Gleitman, L. (in prep.). Language andspatial reasoning.

Li, P., & Gleitman, L. (2002). Turning the tables:Spatial language and spatial cognition. Cogni-tion, 83 , 265–294 .

Li, P., Gleitman, H., Gleitman, L., & Landau, B.(1997), Spatial language in Korean and English.Proceedings from the 19

th Annual Boston Uni-versity Conference on Language Development.Somerville: Cascadilla Press.

Liberman, A. M. (1970). The grammars of speechand language. Cognitive Psychology, 1 , 301–323 .

Liberman, A.M, Cooper, F. S., Shankweiler, D. P.,& Studdert-Kennedy, M. (1967). Perception ofthe speech code. Psychological Review, 74 , 431–461 .

Lidz, J., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. (2002).Understanding how input matters: Verb learn-ing and the footprint of universal grammar.Cognition, 87, 1 5 1–1 78.

Locke, J. (1690/1964). A. D. Woozley (Ed.).An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.Cleveland: Meridian Books.

Loewenstein, J., & Gentner, D. (Submitted2003). Relational language and the de-velopment of relational mapping. CognitivePsychology.

Lucy, J. (1992). Grammatical Categories andCognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Rela-tivity Hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Lucy, J., & Gaskins, S. (2001 ). Grammatical cat-egories and the development of classificationpreferences: A comparative approach. In M.Bowerman, & S. Levinson (Eds.), LanguageAcquisition and Conceptual Development (pp.257–283). Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

Malt, B., Sloman, S., & Gennari, S. (2003).Universality and language specificity in objectnaming. Journal of Memory and Language, 49,20–42 .

Malt, B., Sloman, S., Gennari, S., Shi, M., &Wang, Y. (1999). Knowing versus naming: Sim-ilarity and the linguistic categorization of ar-tifacts. Journal of Memory and Language, 40,230–262 .

Mandler, J. (1996). Preverbal representation andlanguage. In P. Bloom, M. Peterson, L. Nadel,& M. Garrett (Eds.), Language and Space (pp.365–384). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Markman, E., & Hutchinson, J. (1984). Children’ssensitivity to constraints on word meaning:

Taxonomic versus thematic relations. CognitivePsychology, 1 6, 1–27.

Mazuka, R., & Friedman, R. (2000). Linguis-tic relativity in Japanese and English: Is lan-guage the primary determinant in objectclassification? Journal of East Asian Linguistics,9, 353–377.

McDonough, L., Choi, S., & Mandler, J. M.(2003). Understanding spatial relations: Flexi-ble infants, lexical adults. Cognitive Psychology,46, 229–259.

Munnich, E., & Landau, B. (2003). The effectsof spatial language on spatial representation:Setting some boundaries. In D. Gentner,& S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.), Language inMind, (pp. 1 1 3–1 55). Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

Munnich, E., Landau, B., & Dosher, B. A. (2001 ).Spatial language and spatial representation:A cross-linguistic comparison. Cognition, 81 ,1 71–207.

Naigles, L., & Terrazas, P. (1998). Motion-verbgeneralizations in English and Spanish: Influ-ences of language and syntax. Psychological Sci-ence, 9, 363–369.

Nunberg, G. (1978). The Pragmatics of Reference.Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Linguis-tics Club.

Papafragou, A, Li, P., & Han, C. (Submitted2003). Evidentiality and the language/cog-nition interface.

Papafragou, A., & Musolino, J. (2003). Scalarimplicatures: Experiments at the semantics-pragmatics interface. Cognition, 86, 1 53–1 82 .

Papafragou, A., Massey, C., & Gleitman, L.(2002). Shake, rattle ‘n’ roll: the representationof motion in language and cognition. Cognition,84 , 1 89–219.

Papafragou, A., Massey, C., & Gleitman, L.(2003). Motion event conflation and clausestructure. To appear, Proceedings of the 39

th

Annual Meeting of the Chicago Linguistics So-ciety. University of Chicago.

Pederson, E., Danziger, E., Wilkins, D., Levinson,S., Kita, S. & Senft, G. (1998). Semantic typol-ogy and spatial conceptualization. Language,74 , 557–589.

Pena, M., Maki, A., Kovacic, D., Dehaene-Lambertz, G., Koizumi, H., Bouquet, F. et al.(2003). Sounds and silence: An optical topog-raphy study of language recognition at birth.Proceedings of the National Academy of ScienceU S A, 1 00(20), 1 1 702–5 .



Pinker, S. (1984). Language Learnability and Lan-guage Development. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.

Quine, W. V. O. (1960). Word and Object. Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press.

Quinn, P. (2001 ). Concepts are not just forobjects: Categorization of spatial relational in-formation by infants. In D. Rakison, & L. Oakes(Eds.), Early Category and Object Development:Making Sense of the Blooming, Buzzing Confu-sion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Restle, F. (1957). Discrimination of cues inmazes: A resolution of the place-vs.-responsequestion. Psychological Review, 64 , 217–228.

Roberson, D., Davies, I., & Davidoff, J. (2000).Color categories are not universal: Replica-tions and new evidence from a stone-age cul-ture. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Gen-eral, 1 2 9, 369–398.

Rosch, E., Mervis, C. B., Gray, W. D., Johnson,D. M., & Boyes-Braem, P. (1976). Basic objectsin natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 8,382–439.

Sapir, E. (1941 ). In L. Spier, Language, cul-ture and personality: Essays in memory ofEdward Sapir. Menasha, WI: Memorial Pub-lication Fund. Cited in Whorf (1956, Ref. 1 43 ,p. 1 34).

Senghas, A., Coppola, M., Newport, E., &Suppala, T. 1997. Argument structure inNicaraguan Sign Language: The emergenceof grammatical devices. In Proceedings ofBUCLD 21 . Somerville: Cascadilla Press.

Slobin, D. (1996). From ‘thought and language’to ‘thinking for speaking’. In J. Gumperz, & S.C. Levinson (Eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Rela-tivity (pp. 70–96). Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Slobin, D. (2001 ). Form-function relations: Howdo children find out what they are? In M. Bow-erman, & S. Levinson (Eds.), Language Acqui-sition and Conceptual Development (pp. 406–449). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Slobin, D. (2003). Language and thought online:Cognitive consequences of linguistic relativity.In D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.),Language in Mind: Advances in the Investigationof Language and Thought (pp. 1 57–191 ). Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press.

Smith, L. (2001 ). How domain-general processesmay create domain-specific biases. In M. Bow-erman, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.), Language Ac-quisition and Conceptual Development (pp. 101–1 3 1 ). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Smith, L., Colunga, E., & Yoshida (2001 ). Makingan ontology: Cross-linguistic evidence. In D.Rakison, & L. Oakes (Eds.), Early Category andObject Development: Making Sense of the Bloom-ing, Buzzing Confusion (pp. 275–302). Oxford:Oxford University Press.

Snedeker, J., Thorpe, K., & Trueswell, J. (2001 ).On choosing the parse with the scene: Therole of visual context and verb bias in ambigu-ity resolution. Proceedings of the 23

rd AnnualConference of the Cognitive Science Society.Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Soja, N., Carey, S., & Spelke, E. (1991 ). Onto-logical categories guide young children’s induc-tions of word meaning: Object terms and sub-stance terms. Cognition, 38, 1 79–21 1 .

Spelke, E., & Tsivkin, S. (2001a). Language andnumber: A bilingual training study. Cognition,78, 45–88.

Spelke, E., & Tsivkin, S. (2001b). Initial knowl-edge and conceptual change: space and num-ber. In M. Bowerman, & S. C. Levinson (Eds.),Language Acquisition and Conceptual Devel-opment (pp. 70–100). Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Spelke, E., Breinliger, K., Macomber, J., &Jacobson, K. (1992). The origins of knowledge.Psychological Review, 99, 605–632 .

Sperber, D., & Wilson, D. (1986). Relevance: Com-munication and Cognition. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.

Talmy, L. (1985). Lexicalization patterns: Seman-tic structure in lexical forms. In T. Shopen(Ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Descrip-tion (pp. 57–1 49). New York: Cambridge Uni-versity Press.

Tomasello, M. (2000). Do young children haveadult syntactic competence? Cognition, 74 ,209–253 .

Vallortigara, G., Zanforlin, M., & Pasti, G.(1990). Geometric modules in animals’ spatialrepresentations: A test with chicks. Journal ofComparative Psychology, 1 04 , 248–254 .

Varley, R., & Siegal, M. (2000). Evidence forcognition without grammar from causal rea-soning and ‘theory of mind’ in an agrammaticaphasic patient. Current Biology, 1 0, 723–726.

Waxman, S. R., Senghas, A., & Benveniste, S.(1997). A cross-linguistic examination of thenoun-category bias: Its existence and specificityin French- and Spanish-speaking preschool-aged children. Cognitive Psychology, 43 , 1 83–218.



Waxman, S., & Markow, D. (1995). Words as in-vitations to form categories: Evidence from 1 2-to 1 3 -month-old infants. Cognitive Psychology,2 9, 257–302 .

Welder, A. N., & Graham, S. A. (2001 ). The in-fluence of shape similarity and shared labelson infants’ inductive inferences about nonob-vious object properties. Child Development, 72 ,1653–1673 .

Werker, J., & Logan, J. (1985). Cross-language ev-idence for three factors in speech perception.Perception and Psychophysics, 37, 35–44 .

Werker, J., & Tees, R. (1984). Cross-languagespeech perception: Evidence for perceptual re-organization during the first year of life. InfantBehavior and Development, 7, 49–63 .

Whorf, B. L. (1956). J. Carroll (Ed.). Language,Thought and Reality. Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

Wittgenstein, L. (1922). D. F. Pears (Ed.). Trac-tatus Logico-Philosophicus. London: Routledge,1981 .

Xu, F. (2002). The role of language in acquiringobject kind concepts. Cognition, 85 , 223–250.


662

Date post:	29-Jun-2020
Category:	Documents
Upload:	others
View:	8 times
Download:	1 times

CHAPTER 26 Language and Thought · CHAPTER 26 Language and Thought Lila Gleitman Anna Papafragou...

Documents