Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science

Blasí, Damián E.; Henrich, Joseph; Adamou, Evangelia; Kemmerer, David; Majid, Asifa

doi:10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.015

Cited by 120 publications

(108 citation statements)

References 163 publications

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“…A second major aim was to review the existing documentation of emblem repertoires globally. This survey reveals, first, that emblem documentation to date has been patchy, with a particular dearth of studies conducted in indigenous and non-European contexts (a noted problem across the cognitive sciences; see Blasi et al 2022). The survey also uncovered a variety of general approaches and specific methods for the documentation of emblems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Emblems: Gestures at the interface

Gawne¹,

Cooperrider²

2022

Preprint

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Emblems—the THUMBS UP, the HEADSHAKE, the PEACE SIGN, the SHHH—are communicative gestures that have a conventional form and conventional meaning within a particular community. These and other features make them more “word-like” than other gestures. It also positions them at the interface between different communicative phenomena—language and gesture, speech and sign—and between different fields. Here we provide an overview of this recurring feature of the human communicative toolkit. We first discuss the major defining features of emblems, and their points of commonality and difference with neighbouring communicative phenomena. Next, we review efforts to document emblems around the world. Our survey highlights the patchiness of global coverage, as well as strengths and limitations of approaches used to date. Finally, we consider a handful of open questions about emblems, including how they mean, how they are learned, and why they exist in the first place. Addressing these questions will require collaboration among linguists, lexicographers, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others. It will also deepen our understanding of human semiotic systems and how they interface with each other.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

Emblems: Gestures at the interface

Gawne¹,

Cooperrider²

2022

Preprint

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“…The practice in cognitive science of focusing solely on English speakers is all-too-common (29). We note that the use of multiple samples of non-English speakers in the same experiment affords the ability to conduct mini-meta-analyses of key effects.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notably, while prior experiments demonstrate that people can infer the behavioural contexts of songs from different cultures using their acoustic features, these studies frequently have sampling limitations. For instance, some studies rely primarily on English-speaking Western participants (17), and those that have reached participants around the world still rely on English speakers who have access to the Internet (14,19,20); n.b., this important problem affects many areas of the cognitive sciences (29). Thus, although the stimuli participants in these studies listened to were cross-culturally representative, it is unclear how much of the accuracy of listener inferences is accounted for by universal form-function links in musical behaviour, and how much is a product of (Western) enculturation, education, and exposure to world music through globalised media.…”

Section: Mainmentioning

confidence: 99%

Universal interpretations of vocal music

Yurdum¹,

Singh²,

Glowacki³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Despite the variability of music across cultures, some types of human songs share acoustic characteristics with one another. For example, dance songs tend to be loud and rhythmic and lullabies tend to be quiet and melodious. Human perceptual sensitivity to the behavioural contexts of songs on the basis of these acoustic features raises the possibility that basic properties of music are mutually intelligible, independent of linguistic or cultural content. Whether these effects reflect a universal perceptual phenomenon, however, is unclear, because prior studies focus almost exclusively on English-speaking participants, a group that is not representative of humans, writ large. Here we report shared intuitions concerning the behavioural contexts of unfamiliar songs produced in unfamiliar languages, in participants living in Internet-connected industrialised societies (n = 5, 516 native speakers of 28 languages) or smaller-scale societies with limited access to global media (n = 116 native speakers of 3 non-English languages). Participants listened to songs randomly selected from a representative sample of human vocal music, originally used in four behavioural contexts, and rated the degree to which they believed the song was used for each context. Listeners in both industrialised and smaller-scale societies reliably inferred the contexts of dance songs, lullabies, and healing songs, but not love songs. Within and across the cohorts, inferences were mutually consistent. Further, increased linguistic or geographical proximity between listeners and singers only minimally increased the accuracy of the inferences. These results demonstrate that the behavioural contexts of three common forms of music are mutually intelligible across cultures and imply that musical diversity, shaped by cultural evolution, is nonetheless grounded in some universal principles.

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“…Last but not least, we need to consider the importance of generalising results across languages, orthographies, and scripts. Huettig and Ferreira argue, as have others before them (most recently Blasi et al, 2022;Share, 2021), that the focus of reading in English leads to models, theories, and reading instruction methods that are not generalisable to other languages. Figure 1 can be extended to a three-dimensional plot, where language and script characteristics would make up an additional dimension.…”

Section: A Response To "The Myth Of Normal Reading" By Huettig and Fe...mentioning

confidence: 93%