Cognition and native-language grammar: The organizational role of adjective-noun word order in information representation

Abstract

Decades of inquiry have gone into investigating the notion that language shapes human experience, on the premise that the world is highly complicated and that language assists in making it palatable and understandable. In the present work, we address a related, but more specific, proposition: that the various ways in which languages grammatically organize experience lead to different ways of cognitively organizing experience. Whorf's (1956) linguistic relativity principle is the idea that differences across languages can lead to corresponding differences in cognition. Although early studies (e.g., Heider & Olivier, 1972) were unsupportive of Whorf, more recently linguistic relativity has taken on a new face in a new generation of empirical work that has successfully demonstrated the important role of language in cognitive processes. Characteristic of this recent work is the proposition that, even if language does not determine thought, there still exists much room for the influence of language. These are commonly referred to as the strong and weak forms of the Whorfian hypothesis, respectively (see Boroditsky, 2001). Strong linguistic relativity purports that language severely limits thought, such that subtleties of experience not labeled by one's language are literally imperceptible.Its weak counterpart implies crosslinguistic differences in cognitive tendency, rather than potentiality. It is this weak form that is the focus of much recent work.For example, Boroditsky, Schmidt, and Phillips (2003) investigated the effects of gendered articles (through which certain objects are arbitrarily given either feminine or masculine designations) on object perception. They presented speakers of Spanish and German with objects of opposing genders between the two languages. Participants' descriptions were congruent with each object's grammatical gender in their native language. For example, key was described as stereotypically masculine (e.g., "heavy, jagged, metal") by Germans, but as feminine (e.g., "golden, intricate, little") by Spaniards. Similar crosslinguistic differences have been demonstrated for perceptions of causality as a function of causal language rules (Fausey & Boroditsky, 2008), the ability to remember and match arrays of objects as a function of available counting words (Frank, Everett, Fedorenko, & Gibson, 2008), stereotypic judgments as a function of available stereotype labels (Hoffman, Lau, & Johnson, 1986), and perceptions of colors as a function of available color words (Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000). 1037© In the present research, we investigated the influence of native-language adjective-noun word order on category accessibility for nouns and adjectives by comparing Portuguese speakers (in whose language nouns precede adjectives) with English speakers (in whose language adjectives precede nouns). In two studies, we presented participants with different numbers of verbal or pictorial stimuli, and subsequently they answered questions about noun-and adjective-conditioned frequencies. The resul...

Alternative Solutions to a Language Design Problem: The Role of Adjectives and Gender Marking in Efficient Communication

“…Moving beyond adjective order, similar analyses might help explain the cross‐linguistic processing differences that have been observed in languages with postnominal adjective biases (Percy, Sherman, Garcia‐Marques, Mata, & Garcia‐Marques, ; see also Lambert & Paivio, ). More broadly, this characterization might shed light on the existence of strong cross‐linguistic word order preferences for nominal modifiers (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, ; Greenberg, ).…”

The word order of languages predicts native speakers’ working memory

“…Besides semantic biases, however, it is clear that repeated use of specific syntactic structures may impose specific cognitive challenges to speakers, or foster specific processing habits, which in the long term might enhance specific ways of processing information beyond the linguistic domain. Recent research on the effect of syntax on the processing of events, for instance, has shown (1) an effect of canonical noun-adjective word order on the speed at which noun categories are retrieved 48 , (2) and on recognition memory and similarity judgments while classifying items 49 , as well as (3) an effect of transitive vs. intransitive structures, and agentive vs. non-agentive structures (such as “she broke the vase” vs. “the vase broke itself”), on people’s capacity to remember who was the agent in accidental events 50–52 . To our knowledge, however, there is surprisingly no research on the effects of the syntax of one’s native language on cognitive processes unrelated to categorization and discrimination tasks.…”

Gender Essentialism and the Mental Representation of Transgender Women and Men: A Multimethod Investigation of Stereotype Content

“…When people conceptualize transgender groups in terms of the existing binary model of gender, these emergent groups may also become associated with content that distinguishes them from cisgender groups (Ford & Stangor, 1992;Sherman et al, 2009). Rather than extending stereotypes on the basis of shared gender identity or shared sex assigned at birth, people may consider transgender women and men primarily part of the linguistically marked superordinate category transgender (e.g., Nario-Redmond, 2010;Percy, Sherman, Garcia-Marques, Mata, & Garcia-Marques, 2009). One possibility is that the relative scarcity of transgender individuals, as well as a history of being medically pathologized, could lead to these groups being stereotyped as unusual or deviant in a way that cisgender groups are not (Gazzola & Morrison, 2014;Reed, Franks, & Scherr, 2015;Winter et al, 2009).…”