PMID: 11934404Apr 6, 2002Paper

Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning

Cognition
Peggy Li, Lila Gleitman

Abstract

This paper investigates possible influences of the lexical resources of individual languages on the spatial organization and reasoning styles of their users. That there are such powerful and pervasive influences of language on thought is the thesis of the Whorf-Sapir linguistic relativity hypothesis which, after a lengthy period in intellectual limbo, has recently returned to prominence in the anthropological, linguistic, and psycholinguistic literatures. Our point of departure is an influential group of cross-linguistic studies that appear to show that spatial reasoning is strongly affected by the spatial lexicon in everyday use in a community (e.g. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1993). Linguistic and nonlinguistic coding of spatial arrays: explorations in Mayan cognition (Working Paper No. 24). Nijmegen: Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Cognitive Linguistics 6 (1995) 33). Specifically, certain groups customarily use an externally referenced spatial-coordinate system to refer to nearby directions and positions ("to the north") whereas English speakers usually employ a viewer-perspective system ("to the left"). Prior findings and interpretations have been to the effect that users...Continue Reading

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Citations

Jul 5, 2005·Journal of Psycholinguistic Research·Howard R PollioPriscilla Levasseur
Apr 3, 2013·Cognition·Banchiamlack Dessalegn, Barbara Landau
Aug 11, 2004·Trends in Cognitive Sciences·Asifa MajidStephen C Levinson
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