The magic spell of language: Linguistic categories and their perceptual consequences.

Abstract

Language is a tool that directs attention to different aspects of reality. Using participants from the same linguistic community, the authors demonstrate in 4 studies that metasemantic features of linguistic categories influence basic perceptual processes. More specifically, the hypothesis that abstract versus concrete language leads to a more global versus local perceptual focus was supported across 4 experiments, in which participants used (Experiment 1) or were primed either supraliminally (Experiments 2 and 3) or subliminally (Experiment 4) with abstract (adjectives) or concrete (verbs) terms. Participants were shown to display a global versus specific perceptual focus (Experiments 1 and 4), more versus less inclusiveness of categorization (Experiments 2 and 3), and incorporation of more rather than less contextual information (Experiment 3). The implications of this new perspective toward the language-perception interface are discussed in the context of the general linguistic relativity debate.Keywords: linguistic relativity, language, perception, priming, linguistic categorization model Linguistic relativity is the reverse of the view that human cognition constrains the form of language. Relativity is the view that the cognitive processes of a human being-perception, memory, inference, deduction-vary with the structural characteristics-lexicon, morphology, syntax-of the language he speaks. Of course, both can be true, but in different domains of language and cognition. It has proved to be more difficult, however, to find convincing examples of language affecting cognition than of cognition affecting language, but then it is very difficult to invent a really good experiment on linguistic relativity. (Brown, 1986, p. 482)

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