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 of these two types of spatial system solve rotation problems in different ways, reasoning strategies imposed by habitual use of the language-particular lexicons themselves. The present studies reproduce these different problem-solving strategies in speakers of a single language (English) by manipulating landmark cues, suggesting that language itself may not be the key causal factor in choice of spatial perspective. Prior evidence on rotation problem solution from infants (e.g. Acredolo, L.P. (1979). Laboratory versus home: the effect of environment on the 9-month-old infant's choice of spatial reference system. Developmental Psychology, 15 (6), 666-667) and from laboratory animals (e.g. Restle, F. (1975). Discrimination of cues in mazes: a resolution of the place-vs.-response question. Psychological Review, 64, 217-228) suggests a unified interpretation of the findings: creatures approach spatial problems differently depending on the availability and suitability of local landmark cues. The results are discussed in terms of the current debate on the relation of language to thought, with particular emphasis on the question of why different cultural communities favor different perspectives in talking about space.

What is the relation between language and thought? Specifically, how do linguistic and conceptual representations make contact during language learning? This paper addresses these questions by investigating the acquisition of evidentiality (the linguistic encoding of information source) and its relation to children's evidential reasoning. Previous studies have hypothesized that the acquisition of evidentiality is complicated by the subtleness and abstractness of the underlying concepts; other studies have suggested that learning a language which systematically (e.g. grammatically) marks evidential categories might serve as a pacesetter for early reasoning about sources of information. We conducted experimental studies with children learning Korean (a language with evidential morphology) and English (a language without grammaticalized evidentiality) in order to test these hypotheses. Our experiments compared 3-and 4-year-old Korean children's knowledge of the semantics and discourse functions of evidential morphemes to their (non-linguistic) ability to recognize and report different types of evidential sources. They also compared Korean children's source monitoring abilities to the source monitoring abilities of English-speaking children of the same age. We found that Korean-speaking children have considerable success in producing evidential morphology but their comprehension of such morphology is very fragile. Nevertheless, young Korean speakers are able to reason successfully about sources of information in non-linguistic tasks; furthermore, their performance in these tasks is similar to that of English-speaking peers. These results support the conclusion that the acquisition of evidential expressions poses considerable ☆ We wish to thank Lila Gleitman, Henry Gleitman, Eleni Miltsakaki, and the other members of the CHEESE seminar at the University of Pennsylvania for discussion of this project. Thanks also to Seungyun Yang for experimental help. This research was partly supported by NIH/NRSA Grants #F32MH065020 to Anna Papafragou and #1F32HD043532 to Peggy Li and by SSHRC Grant #410-2003-0544 to Chung-hye Han. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: papafragou@psych.udel.edu ,pegs@wjh.harvard.edu, youngonc@sas.upenn.edu, chunghye@sfu.ca. 15 Again, the basic results do not change regardless of the which linguistic score was compared with which non-linguistic score. There is always an effect of Task (Non-linguistic better than Linguistic), and always an effect of Task × Age (with a larger Age effect for Nonlinguistic than Linguistic tasks). 24 Such mapping problems have been originally pointed out and discussed in the context of learning procedures for mental verbs (Gillette, Gleitman, Gleitman, & Lederer, 1999;Gleitman, 1990;Papafragou, Cassidy, Gleitman, & Hulbert, 2004;Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004). As these authors point out, observational cues to the meaning of mental verbs such as think or believe are few and impoverished compared to those for action verbs such as catch or eat. On at least some occas...

Shown an entity (e.g., a plastic whisk) labeled by a novel noun in neutral syntax, speakers of Japanese, a classifier language, are more likely to assume the noun refers to the substance (plastic) than are speakers of English, a count/mass language, who are instead more likely to assume it refers to the object kind (whisk; Imai and Gentner, 1997). Five experiments replicated this language type effect on entity construal, extended it to quite different stimuli from those studied before, and extended it to a comparison between Mandarin-speakers and English-speakers. A sixth experiment, which did not involve interpreting the meaning of a noun or a pronoun that stands for a noun, failed to find any effect of language type on entity construal. Thus, the overall pattern of findings supports a non-Whorfian, language on language account, according to which sensitivity to lexical statistics in a count/mass language leads adults to assign a novel noun in neutral syntax the status of a count noun, influencing construal of ambiguous entities. The experiments also document and explore cross-linguistically universal factors that influence entity construal, and favor Prasada's (1999) hypothesis that features indicating non-accidentalness of an entity's form lead participants to a construal of object-kind rather than substance-kind. Finally, the experiments document the age at which the language type effect emerges in lexical projection. The details of the developmental pattern are consistent with the lexical statistics hypothesis, along with a universal increase in sensitivity to material kind.

The Earth System Modeling Framework is a componentbased architecture for developing and assembling climate and related models. A virtual machine underlies the component-level constructs in ESMF, providing both a foundation for performance portability and mechanisms for resource allocation and component sequencing.