How thought is mapped into words

Abstract

To English speakers, the distinctions between blue and green, cup and glass, or cut and break seem self-evident. The intuition is that these words label categories that have an existence independent of language, and language merely captures the pre-existing categories. But cross-linguistic work shows that the named distinctions are not nearly as self-evident as they may feel. There is diversity in how languages divide up domains including color, number, plants and animals, drinking vessels and household containers, body parts, spatial relations, locomotion, acts of cutting and breaking, acts of carrying and holding, and more. Still, studies documenting variability across languages also uncover striking commonalities. Such commonalities indicate that there are sources of constraint on the variation. Both the commonalities and divergences carry important lessons for Cognitive Science. They speak to the causal relations among language, thought, and culture; the possibility of cross-culturally shared aspects of perception and cognition; the methods needed for studying general-purpose, nonlinguistic concepts; and how languages are learned. WIREs Cogn Sci 2013, 4:583-597. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1251 CONFLICT OF INTEREST: The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.

Are the motor features of verb meanings represented in the precentral motor cortices? Yes, but within the context of a flexible, multilevel architecture for conceptual knowledge

“…It also is noteworthy that when words enter the architecture, they sculpt it in many fine-grained ways, for they are essentially language-particular coding devices that have been culturally designed to package concepts for communicative purposes (Malt and Majid, 2013;Tomasello, 2014). Extending the original ideas of Paivio (1986), some researchers have proposed that the statistical co-occurrence patterns of word-forms across discourses can give rise to a "disembodied" form of conceptual knowledge, and a number of computational studies have shown that, on the basis of such associations among word-forms, it is possible to model a variety of psycholinguistic phenomena, including priming effects, sentence completions, ambiguity resolution, and the extraction of gist from texts (Burgess & Lund, 1997;Landauer & Dumais, 1997;Griffiths et al, 2007;Jones & Mewhort, 2007).…”

How language shapes the cultural inheritance of categories

“…Classifications of the social world vary in how gender, race, and social hierarchies are organized (23,24). Classifications of artifacts vary in the very entities there are to be classified, with distinct types of tools, clothing, furniture, and so forth, as well as category boundaries (25). And there is marked linguistic variation in the classification of dimensions of experience, including color, number, time, space, emotions, even senses (26,27).…”

Human locomotion in languages: Constraints on moving and meaning

“…Languages often differ in the contrasts they lexicalize, a phenomenon documented for properties (such as colors and tastes), objects (such as plants, animals, and human-made objects), and relations (such as those captured by spatial terms and many verbs) (for review and discussion, see, e.g., Bowerman & Levinson, 2001;Malt & Majid, 2013;Malt & Wolff, 2010). Given the pervasive diversity, one could counter that the world must present few pre-existing distinctions to the observer, and differences between languages may be arbitrary and unpredictable.…”