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The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: How Language Influences How We Express Ourselves

Thomas Barwick / Getty Images

What to Know About the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Real-world examples of linguistic relativity, linguistic relativity in psychology.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, also known as linguistic relativity, refers to the idea that the language a person speaks can influence their worldview, thought, and even how they experience and understand the world.

While more extreme versions of the hypothesis have largely been discredited, a growing body of research has demonstrated that language can meaningfully shape how we understand the world around us and even ourselves.

Keep reading to learn more about linguistic relativity, including some real-world examples of how it shapes thoughts, emotions, and behavior.  

The hypothesis is named after anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir and his student, Benjamin Lee Whorf. While the hypothesis is named after them both, the two never actually formally co-authored a coherent hypothesis together.

This Hypothesis Aims to Figure Out How Language and Culture Are Connected

Sapir was interested in charting the difference in language and cultural worldviews, including how language and culture influence each other. Whorf took this work on how language and culture shape each other a step further to explore how different languages might shape thought and behavior.

Since then, the concept has evolved into multiple variations, some more credible than others.

Linguistic Determinism Is an Extreme Version of the Hypothesis

Linguistic determinism, for example, is a more extreme version suggesting that a person’s perception and thought are limited to the language they speak. An early example of linguistic determinism comes from Whorf himself who argued that the Hopi people in Arizona don’t conjugate verbs into past, present, and future tenses as English speakers do and that their words for units of time (like “day” or “hour”) were verbs rather than nouns.

From this, he concluded that the Hopi don’t view time as a physical object that can be counted out in minutes and hours the way English speakers do. Instead, Whorf argued, the Hopi view time as a formless process.

This was then taken by others to mean that the Hopi don’t have any concept of time—an extreme view that has since been repeatedly disproven.

There is some evidence for a more nuanced version of linguistic relativity, which suggests that the structure and vocabulary of the language you speak can influence how you understand the world around you. To understand this better, it helps to look at real-world examples of the effects language can have on thought and behavior.

Different Languages Express Colors Differently

Color is one of the most common examples of linguistic relativity. Most known languages have somewhere between two and twelve color terms, and the way colors are categorized varies widely. In English, for example, there are distinct categories for blue and green .

Blue and Green

But in Korean, there is one word that encompasses both. This doesn’t mean Korean speakers can’t see blue, it just means blue is understood as a variant of green rather than a distinct color category all its own.

In Russian, meanwhile, the colors that English speakers would lump under the umbrella term of “blue” are further subdivided into two distinct color categories, “siniy” and “goluboy.” They roughly correspond to light blue and dark blue in English. But to Russian speakers, they are as distinct as orange and brown .

In one study comparing English and Russian speakers, participants were shown a color square and then asked to choose which of the two color squares below it was the closest in shade to the first square.

The test specifically focused on varying shades of blue ranging from “siniy” to “goluboy.” Russian speakers were not only faster at selecting the matching color square but were more accurate in their selections.

The Way Location Is Expressed Varies Across Languages

This same variation occurs in other areas of language. For example, in Guugu Ymithirr, a language spoken by Aboriginal Australians, spatial orientation is always described in absolute terms of cardinal directions. While an English speaker would say the laptop is “in front of” you, a Guugu Ymithirr speaker would say it was north, south, west, or east of you.

As a result, Aboriginal Australians have to be constantly attuned to cardinal directions because their language requires it (just as Russian speakers develop a more instinctive ability to discern between shades of what English speakers call blue because their language requires it).

So when you ask a Guugu Ymithirr speaker to tell you which way south is, they can point in the right direction without a moment’s hesitation. Meanwhile, most English speakers would struggle to accurately identify South without the help of a compass or taking a moment to recall grade school lessons about how to find it.

The concept of these cardinal directions exists in English, but English speakers aren’t required to think about or use them on a daily basis so it’s not as intuitive or ingrained in how they orient themselves in space.

Just as with other aspects of thought and perception, the vocabulary and grammatical structure we have for thinking about or talking about what we feel doesn’t create our feelings, but it does shape how we understand them and, to an extent, how we experience them.

Words Help Us Put a Name to Our Emotions

For example, the ability to detect displeasure from a person’s face is universal. But in a language that has the words “angry” and “sad,” you can further distinguish what kind of displeasure you observe in their facial expression. This doesn’t mean humans never experienced anger or sadness before words for them emerged. But they may have struggled to understand or explain the subtle differences between different dimensions of displeasure.

In one study of English speakers, toddlers were shown a picture of a person with an angry facial expression. Then, they were given a set of pictures of people displaying different expressions including happy, sad, surprised, scared, disgusted, or angry. Researchers asked them to put all the pictures that matched the first angry face picture into a box.

The two-year-olds in the experiment tended to place all faces except happy faces into the box. But four-year-olds were more selective, often leaving out sad or fearful faces as well as happy faces. This suggests that as our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

But some research suggests the influence is not limited to just developing a wider vocabulary for categorizing emotions. Language may “also help constitute emotion by cohering sensations into specific perceptions of ‘anger,’ ‘disgust,’ ‘fear,’ etc.,” said Dr. Harold Hong, a board-certified psychiatrist at New Waters Recovery in North Carolina.

As our vocabulary for talking about emotions expands, so does our ability to understand and distinguish those emotions.

Words for emotions, like words for colors, are an attempt to categorize a spectrum of sensations into a handful of distinct categories. And, like color, there’s no objective or hard rule on where the boundaries between emotions should be which can lead to variation across languages in how emotions are categorized.

Emotions Are Categorized Differently in Different Languages

Just as different languages categorize color a little differently, researchers have also found differences in how emotions are categorized. In German, for example, there’s an emotion called “gemütlichkeit.”

While it’s usually translated as “cozy” or “ friendly ” in English, there really isn’t a direct translation. It refers to a particular kind of peace and sense of belonging that a person feels when surrounded by the people they love or feel connected to in a place they feel comfortable and free to be who they are.

Harold Hong, MD, Psychiatrist

The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion.

You may have felt gemütlichkeit when staying up with your friends to joke and play games at a sleepover. You may feel it when you visit home for the holidays and spend your time eating, laughing, and reminiscing with your family in the house you grew up in.

In Japanese, the word “amae” is just as difficult to translate into English. Usually, it’s translated as "spoiled child" or "presumed indulgence," as in making a request and assuming it will be indulged. But both of those have strong negative connotations in English and amae is a positive emotion .

Instead of being spoiled or coddled, it’s referring to that particular kind of trust and assurance that comes with being nurtured by someone and knowing that you can ask for what you want without worrying whether the other person might feel resentful or burdened by your request.

You might have felt amae when your car broke down and you immediately called your mom to pick you up, without having to worry for even a second whether or not she would drop everything to help you.

Regardless of which languages you speak, though, you’re capable of feeling both of these emotions. “The lack of a word for an emotion in a language does not mean that its speakers don't experience that emotion,” Dr. Hong explained.

What This Means For You

“While having the words to describe emotions can help us better understand and regulate them, it is possible to experience and express those emotions without specific labels for them.” Without the words for these feelings, you can still feel them but you just might not be able to identify them as readily or clearly as someone who does have those words. 

Rhee S. Lexicalization patterns in color naming in Korean . In: Raffaelli I, Katunar D, Kerovec B, eds. Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics. Vol 78. John Benjamins Publishing Company; 2019:109-128. Doi:10.1075/sfsl.78.06rhe

Winawer J, Witthoft N, Frank MC, Wu L, Wade AR, Boroditsky L. Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination . Proc Natl Acad Sci USA. 2007;104(19):7780-7785.  10.1073/pnas.0701644104

Lindquist KA, MacCormack JK, Shablack H. The role of language in emotion: predictions from psychological constructionism . Front Psychol. 2015;6. Doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00444

By Rachael Green Rachael is a New York-based writer and freelance writer for Verywell Mind, where she leverages her decades of personal experience with and research on mental illness—particularly ADHD and depression—to help readers better understand how their mind works and how to manage their mental health.

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis)

Mia Belle Frothingham

Author, Researcher, Science Communicator

BA with minors in Psychology and Biology, MRes University of Edinburgh

Mia Belle Frothingham is a Harvard University graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in Sciences with minors in biology and psychology

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Saul McLeod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul McLeod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

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On This Page:

There are about seven thousand languages heard around the world – they all have different sounds, vocabularies, and structures. As you know, language plays a significant role in our lives.

But one intriguing question is – can it actually affect how we think?

It is widely thought that reality and how one perceives the world is expressed in spoken words and are precisely the same as reality.

That is, perception and expression are understood to be synonymous, and it is assumed that speech is based on thoughts. This idea believes that what one says depends on how the world is encoded and decoded in the mind.

However, many believe the opposite.

In that, what one perceives is dependent on the spoken word. Basically, that thought depends on language, not the other way around.

What Is The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

Twentieth-century linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf are known for this very principle and its popularization. Their joint theory, known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or, more commonly, the Theory of Linguistic Relativity, holds great significance in all scopes of communication theories.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that the grammatical and verbal structure of a person’s language influences how they perceive the world. It emphasizes that language either determines or influences one’s thoughts.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that people experience the world based on the structure of their language, and that linguistic categories shape and limit cognitive processes. It proposes that differences in language affect thought, perception, and behavior, so speakers of different languages think and act differently.

For example, different words mean various things in other languages. Not every word in all languages has an exact one-to-one translation in a foreign language.

Because of these small but crucial differences, using the wrong word within a particular language can have significant consequences.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is sometimes called “linguistic relativity” or the “principle of linguistic relativity.” So while they have slightly different names, they refer to the same basic proposal about the relationship between language and thought.

How Language Influences Culture

Culture is defined by the values, norms, and beliefs of a society. Our culture can be considered a lens through which we undergo the world and develop a shared meaning of what occurs around us.

The language that we create and use is in response to the cultural and societal needs that arose. In other words, there is an apparent relationship between how we talk and how we perceive the world.

One crucial question that many intellectuals have asked is how our society’s language influences its culture.

Linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his then-student Benjamin Whorf were interested in answering this question.

Together, they created the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which states that our thought processes predominantly determine how we look at the world.

Our language restricts our thought processes – our language shapes our reality. Simply, the language that we use shapes the way we think and how we see the world.

Since the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis theorizes that our language use shapes our perspective of the world, people who speak different languages have different views of the world.

In the 1920s, Benjamin Whorf was a Yale University graduate student studying with linguist Edward Sapir, who was considered the father of American linguistic anthropology.

Sapir was responsible for documenting and recording the cultures and languages of many Native American tribes disappearing at an alarming rate. He and his predecessors were well aware of the close relationship between language and culture.

Anthropologists like Sapir need to learn the language of the culture they are studying to understand the worldview of its speakers truly. Whorf believed that the opposite is also true, that language affects culture by influencing how its speakers think.

His hypothesis proposed that the words and structures of a language influence how its speaker behaves and feels about the world and, ultimately, the culture itself.

Simply put, Whorf believed that you see the world differently from another person who speaks another language due to the specific language you speak.

Human beings do not live in the matter-of-fact world alone, nor solitary in the world of social action as traditionally understood, but are very much at the pardon of the certain language which has become the medium of communication and expression for their society.

To a large extent, the real world is unconsciously built on habits in regard to the language of the group. We hear and see and otherwise experience broadly as we do because the language habits of our community predispose choices of interpretation.

Studies & Examples

The lexicon, or vocabulary, is the inventory of the articles a culture speaks about and has classified to understand the world around them and deal with it effectively.

For example, our modern life is dictated for many by the need to travel by some vehicle – cars, buses, trucks, SUVs, trains, etc. We, therefore, have thousands of words to talk about and mention, including types of models, vehicles, parts, or brands.

The most influential aspects of each culture are similarly reflected in the dictionary of its language. Among the societies living on the islands in the Pacific, fish have significant economic and cultural importance.

Therefore, this is reflected in the rich vocabulary that describes all aspects of the fish and the environments that islanders depend on for survival.

For example, there are over 1,000 fish species in Palau, and Palauan fishers knew, even long before biologists existed, details about the anatomy, behavior, growth patterns, and habitat of most of them – far more than modern biologists know today.

Whorf’s studies at Yale involved working with many Native American languages, including Hopi. He discovered that the Hopi language is quite different from English in many ways, especially regarding time.

Western cultures and languages view times as a flowing river that carries us continuously through the present, away from the past, and to the future.

Our grammar and system of verbs reflect this concept with particular tenses for past, present, and future.

We perceive this concept of time as universal in that all humans see it in the same way.

Although a speaker of Hopi has very different ideas, their language’s structure both reflects and shapes the way they think about time. Seemingly, the Hopi language has no present, past, or future tense; instead, they divide the world into manifested and unmanifest domains.

The manifested domain consists of the physical universe, including the present, the immediate past, and the future; the unmanifest domain consists of the remote past and the future and the world of dreams, thoughts, desires, and life forces.

Also, there are no words for minutes, minutes, or days of the week. Native Hopi speakers often had great difficulty adapting to life in the English-speaking world when it came to being on time for their job or other affairs.

It is due to the simple fact that this was not how they had been conditioned to behave concerning time in their Hopi world, which followed the phases of the moon and the movements of the sun.

Today, it is widely believed that some aspects of perception are affected by language.

One big problem with the original Sapir-Whorf hypothesis derives from the idea that if a person’s language has no word for a specific concept, then that person would not understand that concept.

Honestly, the idea that a mother tongue can restrict one’s understanding has been largely unaccepted. For example, in German, there is a term that means to take pleasure in another person’s unhappiness.

While there is no translatable equivalent in English, it just would not be accurate to say that English speakers have never experienced or would not be able to comprehend this emotion.

Just because there is no word for this in the English language does not mean English speakers are less equipped to feel or experience the meaning of the word.

Not to mention a “chicken and egg” problem with the theory.

Of course, languages are human creations, very much tools we invented and honed to suit our needs. Merely showing that speakers of diverse languages think differently does not tell us whether it is the language that shapes belief or the other way around.

Supporting Evidence

On the other hand, there is hard evidence that the language-associated habits we acquire play a role in how we view the world. And indeed, this is especially true for languages that attach genders to inanimate objects.

There was a study done that looked at how German and Spanish speakers view different things based on their given gender association in each respective language.

The results demonstrated that in describing things that are referred to as masculine in Spanish, speakers of the language marked them as having more male characteristics like “strong” and “long.” Similarly, these same items, which use feminine phrasings in German, were noted by German speakers as effeminate, like “beautiful” and “elegant.”

The findings imply that speakers of each language have developed preconceived notions of something being feminine or masculine, not due to the objects” characteristics or appearances but because of how they are categorized in their native language.

It is important to remember that the Theory of Linguistic Relativity (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) also successfully achieves openness. The theory is shown as a window where we view the cognitive process, not as an absolute.

It is set forth to look at a phenomenon differently than one usually would. Furthermore, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is very simple and logically sound. Understandably, one’s atmosphere and culture will affect decoding.

Likewise, in studies done by the authors of the theory, many Native American tribes do not have a word for particular things because they do not exist in their lives. The logical simplism of this idea of relativism provides parsimony.

Truly, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis makes sense. It can be utilized in describing great numerous misunderstandings in everyday life. When a Pennsylvanian says “yuns,” it does not make any sense to a Californian, but when examined, it is just another word for “you all.”

The Linguistic Relativity Theory addresses this and suggests that it is all relative. This concept of relativity passes outside dialect boundaries and delves into the world of language – from different countries and, consequently, from mind to mind.

Is language reality honestly because of thought, or is it thought which occurs because of language? The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis very transparently presents a view of reality being expressed in language and thus forming in thought.

The principles rehashed in it show a reasonable and even simple idea of how one perceives the world, but the question is still arguable: thought then language or language then thought?

Modern Relevance

Regardless of its age, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or the Linguistic Relativity Theory, has continued to force itself into linguistic conversations, even including pop culture.

The idea was just recently revisited in the movie “Arrival,” – a science fiction film that engagingly explores the ways in which an alien language can affect and alter human thinking.

And even if some of the most drastic claims of the theory have been debunked or argued against, the idea has continued its relevance, and that does say something about its importance.

Hypotheses, thoughts, and intellectual musings do not need to be totally accurate to remain in the public eye as long as they make us think and question the world – and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis does precisely that.

The theory does not only make us question linguistic theory and our own language but also our very existence and how our perceptions might shape what exists in this world.

There are generalities that we can expect every person to encounter in their day-to-day life – in relationships, love, work, sadness, and so on. But thinking about the more granular disparities experienced by those in diverse circumstances, linguistic or otherwise, helps us realize that there is more to the story than ours.

And beautifully, at the same time, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis reiterates the fact that we are more alike than we are different, regardless of the language we speak.

Isn’t it just amazing that linguistic diversity just reveals to us how ingenious and flexible the human mind is – human minds have invented not one cognitive universe but, indeed, seven thousand!

Kay, P., & Kempton, W. (1984). What is the Sapir‐Whorf hypothesis?. American anthropologist, 86(1), 65-79.

Whorf, B. L. (1952). Language, mind, and reality. ETC: A review of general semantics, 167-188.

Whorf, B. L. (1997). The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language. In Sociolinguistics (pp. 443-463). Palgrave, London.

Whorf, B. L. (2012). Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT press.

Supplement to Relativism

The linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think of it, in the sense that people in Germany speak German, is a historical or social or political notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one another than various dialects of Chinese are. But the rough, commonsense divisions between languages will suffice for our purposes.

There are around 5000 languages in use today, and each is quite different from many of the others. Differences are especially pronounced between languages of different families, e.g., between Indo-European languages like English and Hindi and Ancient Greek, on the one hand, and non-Indo-European languages like Hopi and Chinese and Swahili, on the other.

Many thinkers have urged that large differences in language lead to large differences in experience and thought. They hold that each language embodies a worldview, with quite different languages embodying quite different views, so that speakers of different languages think about the world in quite different ways. This view is sometimes called the Whorf-hypothesis or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis , after the linguists who made if famous. But the label linguistic relativity , which is more common today, has the advantage that makes it easier to separate the hypothesis from the details of Whorf's views, which are an endless subject of exegetical dispute (Gumperz and Levinson, 1996, contains a sampling of recent literature on the hypothesis).

The suggestion that different languages carve the world up in different ways, and that as a result their speakers think about it differently has a certain appeal. But questions about the extent and kind of impact that language has on thought are empirical questions that can only be settled by empirical investigation. And although linguistic relativism is perhaps the most popular version of descriptive relativism, the conviction and passion of partisans on both sides of the issue far outrun the available evidence. As usual in discussions of relativism, it is important to resist all-or-none thinking. The key question is whether there are interesting and defensible versions of linguistic relativism between those that are trivially true (the Babylonians didn't have a counterpart of the word ‘telephone’, so they didn't think about telephones) and those that are dramatic but almost certainly false (those who speak different languages see the world in completely different ways).

A Preliminary Statement of the Hypothesis

Interesting versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis embody two claims:

Linguistic Diversity : Languages, especially members of quite different language families, differ in important ways from one another. Linguistic Influence on Thought : The structure and lexicon of one's language influences how one perceives and conceptualizes the world, and they do so in a systematic way.

Together these two claims suggest that speakers of quite different languages think about the world in quite different ways. There is a clear sense in which the thesis of linguistic diversity is uncontroversial. Even if all human languages share many underlying, abstract linguistic universals, there are often large differences in their syntactic structures and in their lexicons. The second claim is more controversial, but since linguistic forces could shape thought in varying degrees, it comes in more and less plausible forms.

1. History of the Hypothesis

Like many other relativistic themes, the hypothesis of linguistic relativity became a serious topic of discussion in late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century Germany, particularly in the work of Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). It was later defended by thinkers as diverse as Ernst Cassirer and Peter Winch. Thus Cassirer tells us that

...the distinctions which here are taken for granted, the analysis of reality in terms of things and processes, permanent and transitory aspects, objects and actions, do not precede language as a substratum of given fact, but that language itself is what initiates such articulations, and develops them in its own sphere (1946, p. 12).

But the hypothesis came to prominence though the work of Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf. Indeed, it is often called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis , or simply the Whorf hypothesis .

There are connections among some of these writers; for example, Sapir wrote his M.A. thesis on Herder's Origin of Language . Still, this is a remarkably diverse group of thinkers who often arrived at their views by different routes, and so it is not surprising that the linguistic relativity hypothesis comes in a variety of forms.

Sapir and Whorf

It will help to see why the linguistic relativity hypothesis captivated so many thinkers if we briefly consider the more arresting claims of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf. Sapir was an American anthropological linguist who, like so many anthropologists of his day, was a student of Franz Boas. He was also the teacher of Whorf, a businessman and amateur linguist.

Unlike earlier partisans of linguistic relativism, Sapir and Whorf based their claims on first-hand experience of the cultures and languages they described, which gave their accounts a good deal of immediacy. I will quote a few of the purpler passages to convey the flavor of their claims, for this was partly what galvanized the imagination of so many readers.

In a paper published in 1929 Sapir tells us:

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection (1929, p. 209).

Our language affects how we perceive things:

Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose. …We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation (p. 210).

But the differences don't end with perception:

The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same worlds with different labels attached (p. 209).

The linguistic relativity hypothesis grained its widest audience through the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose collected writings became something of a relativistic manifesto.

Whorf presents a moving target, with most of his claims coming in both extreme and in more cautious forms. Debate continues about his considered views, but there is little doubt that his bolder claims, unimpeded by caveats or qualifications, were better suited to captivate his readers than more timid claims would have been.

When languages are similar, Whorf tells us, there is little likelihood of dramatic cognitive differences. But languages that differ markedly from English and other Western European languages (which Whorf calls, collectively, “Standard Average European” or SAE) often do lead their speakers to have very different worldviews. Thus

We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity , which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. …The relativity of all conceptual systems , ours included, and their dependence upon language stand revealed (1956, p. 214f, italics added). We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds--and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds (p. 213). …no individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality but is constrained to certain modes of interpretation even while he thinks himself most free (p. 214).

In fairness it must be stressed that these passages come from a single essay, “Science and Linguistics,” of 1940, and in other places Whorf's tone is often more measured. But not always; elsewhere he also says thing like

…users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world (1956, p. 221).

And in yet a third essay “facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for unlike formulation of them” (1956, p. 235).

The passages from Sapir and Whorf bristle with metaphors of coercion: our thought is “at the mercy” of our language, it is “constrained” by it; no one is free to describe the world in a neutral way; we are “compelled” to read certain features into the world (p. 262). The view that language completely determines how we think is often called linguistic determinism . Hamann and Herder sometimes seem to equate language with thought, and in these moods, at least, they came close to endorsing this view.

1.1 Linguistic Relativism and Metaphysics

Some writers have linked these themes directly to issues in metaphysics. For example Graham (1989, Appendix 2) argues that there are vast differences among human languages and that many of the concepts or categories (e.g., physical object, causation, quantity) writers like Aristotle and Kant and Strawson held were central, even indispensable, to human thought, are nothing more than parochial shadows cast by the structure of Indo-European languages. These notions, it is said, have no counterparts in many non-Indo-European languages like Chinese. If this is so, then a fairly strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis might be true, but the thesis hasn't been backed with strong empirical evidence and the most common views today lie at the opposite end of the spectrum. Indeed, Whorf himself held a similar view:

[Western] Science …has not yet freed itself from the illusory necessities of common logic which are only at bottom necessities of grammatical pattern in Western Aryan grammar; [e.g.,] necessities for substances which are only necessities for substantives in certain sentence positions …(1956, pp. 269-270).

It is worth noting, finally, that although Whorf was certainly a descriptive relativist he was not a normative relativist . He believed that some languages gave rise to more accurate worldviews than others. Indeed, he thought that the Hopi worldview was superior in various ways to that of speakers of Indo-European languages (e.g., 1956, p. 55, p. 262).

2. The Many Versions of Linguistic Relativism

Any serious discussion of the linguistic relativity hypothesis requires us to answer three questions

• Which aspects of language influence which aspects of thought in some systematic way?
• What form does that influence take?
• How strong is that influence?

For example, certain features of syntax or of the lexicon might exert a causal influence on certain aspects of visual perception (e.g., on which colors we can discriminate), classification (e.g., on how we sort things by their color), or long-term memory (e.g., on which differences among colors we remember most accurately) in clearly specifiable ways. If there is such an influence we would also like to know what mechanisms mediate it, but until we have clearer answers to the first three questions, we are not well positioned to answer this.

Human languages are flexible and extensible, so most things that can be said in one can be approximated in another; if nothing else, words and phrases can be borrowed ( Schadenfreude , je ne sais quoi ). But what is easy to say in one language may be harder to say in a second, and this may make it easier or more natural or more common for speakers of the first language to think in a certain way than for speakers of the second language to do so. A concept or category may be more available in some linguistic communities than in others (e.g., Brown, 1956, pp. 307ff). In short, the linguistic relativity hypothesis comes in stronger and weaker forms, depending on the hypothesized forms and the hypothesized strength of the hypothesized influence.

Various aspects of language might affect cognition.

Grammar Languages can differ in their grammar or syntax. To take a simple example, typical word order may vary. In English, the common order is subject, verb, object. In Japanese it is subject, object, verb. In Welsh, verb, subject, object. Languages can differ in whether they make a distinction between intransitive verbs and adjectives. And there are many subtler sorts of grammatical difference as well. It should be noted that grammar here does not mean the prescriptive grammar we learned in grammar school, but the syntactic structure of a language; in this sense, a grammar comprises a set of rules (or some equivalent device) that can generate all and only the sentences of a given language. Lexicon Different languages have different lexicons (vocabularies), but the important point here is that the lexicons of different languages may classify things in different ways. For example, the color lexicons of some languages segment the color spectrum at different places. Semantics Different languages have different semantic features (over and above differences in lexical semantics) Metaphor Different languages employ different metaphors or employ them in different ways. Pragmatics It is increasingly clear that context plays a vital role in the use and understanding of language, and it is possible that differences in the way speakers of different languages use their languages in concrete settings affects their mental life.

For the most part discussions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis have focused on grammar and lexicon as independent variables. Thus, many of Whorf's claims, e.g., his claims about the way Hopi thought about time, were based on (what he took to be) large-scale differences between Hopi and Standard Average European that included grammatical and lexical differences (e.g., 1956, p. 158). Subsequence research by Ekkehart Malotki (e.g., 1983) and others suggests that Whorf's more dramatic claims were false, but the important point here is that the most prominent versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis involved large-scale features of language.

Language might influence many different aspects of thought. Most empirical work has focused, appropriately enough, on those aspects that are easiest to assess without relying on language. This is important, since we otherwise risk finding influences of one aspect of language on some related aspect of language , rather than on some aspect of thought. Commonly studied cognitive variables include perceptual discrimination, availability in memory, and classification.

2.1 Testing the Linguistic Relativity Hypotheses

In light of the vast literature on linguistic relativity hypotheses, one would expect that a good deal of careful experimental work had been done on the topic. It hasn't. Often the only evidence cited in favor of such hypotheses is to point to a difference between two languages and assert that it adds up to a difference in modes of thought. But this simply assumes what needs to be shown, namely that such linguistic differences give rise to cognitive differences. On the other hand, refutations of the hypothesis often target implausibly extreme versions of it or proceed as though refutations of it in one domain (e.g., color language and color cognition) show that it is false across the board.

2.2 Many Versions of the Hypothesis have not been Tested

A linguistic relativity hypothesis says that some particular aspect of language influences some particular aspect of cognition . Many different aspects of language could, for all we know, influence many different aspects of cognition. This means that a study showing that some particular aspect of language (e.g., the color lexicon of a language) does (or does not) influence some particular aspect of cognition (e.g., recognition memory of colors) does not tell us whether other aspects of language (e.g., the lexicon for spatial relations) influence other aspects of cognition (e.g., spatial reasoning). It does not even tell us whether the single aspect of language we focused on affects any aspects of thought besides the one we studied, or whether other aspects of language influence the single aspect of thought we examined.

The point here is not merely a theoretical one. When the mind is seen as all of a piece, whether it's the result of stepping through Piaget's universal stages of development, the output of universal learning mechanisms, or the operation of a general-purpose computer, confirming or disconfirming the hypothesis in one area (e.g., color) might bear on its status in other areas. But there is increasing evidence that the mind is, to at least some degree, modular, with different cognitive modules doing domain specific work (e.g., parsing syntax, recognizing faces) and processing different kinds of information in different kinds of ways. If this is right, there is less reason to expect that findings about the influence of language on one aspect of cognition will generalize to other aspects.

Only a handful of versions of the claim that linguistic feature X influences cognitive feature Y in way Z have ever been tested. Some can doubtless be ruled out on the basis of common sense knowledge or previous investigation. But many remain that have yet to be studied. Moreover, those that have been studied often have not been studied with the care they deserve. A few have, though, and we will now turn to them.

Example: Color Language and Color Cognition

Much of the most rigorous investigation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis involves color language and color cognition. In the 1950s and 60s, this was an area where linguistic relativity seemed quite plausible. On the one hand, there is nothing in the physics of light (e.g., in facts about surface spectral reflectances) that suggests drawing boundaries between colors at one place rather than another; in this sense our segmentations of the spectrum are arbitrary. On the one hand, it was well known that different languages had color terms that segmented the color spectrum at different places. So since nothing in the physics of color could determine how humans thought about color, it seemed natural to hypothesis that color cognition followed the grooves laid down by color language.

Color was also an auspicious object of study, because investigators could use Munsell color chips (a widely used, standardized set of chips of different colors) or similar stimulus materials with subjects in quite different locations, thus assuring that whatever differences they found in their dependent variables really did involve the same thing, color (as anchored in the chips), rather than something more nebulous.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's work (1969) on basic color terms did much to raise the quality of empirical work on the linguistic relativity hypothesis. And together with much subsequent work it strongly suggests that the strongest, across-the-board versions of the linguistic relativity hypothesis are false when it comes to color language and color cognition. We now know that colors may be a rather special case, however, for although there is nothing in the physics of color that suggests particular segmentations of the spectrum, the opponent-process theory of color vision, now well confirmed, tells us that there are neurophysiological facts about human beings that influence many of the ways in which we perceive colors. We don't know of anything comparable innate mechanisms that would channel thought about social traits or biological classification of diseases in similarly deep grooves. There may well be cross-cultural similarities in the ways human beings think about these things, but we can't conclude this from the work on color.

3. Innateness and Linguistic Universals

The linguist Noam Chomsky has argued for almost half a century that human beings could only learn natural languages if they had a good deal of innate linguistic equipment to guide their way. He has characterized this equipment in different ways over the years, but the abiding theme is that without it children could never get from the sparse set of utterances they hear to the rich linguistic ability they achieve.

3.1 Poverty of the Stimulus Arguments

In just a few years all normal children acquire the language that is spoken by their family and others around them. They acquire a very complex and virtually unbounded ability to distinguish sentences from non-sentences and to understand and utter a virtually unlimited number of sentences they have never thought of before. The child acquires this ability on the basis of the utterances she hears and the feedback (rarely in the form of corrections) she receives. The problem is that the child's data here are very unsystematic and sparse compared to the systematic and nearly unbounded linguistic competence the child quickly acquires.

Hence, the argument continues, the child needs help to get from this impoverished input to the rich output (the acquisition of a grammar of a complex natural language), and this help can only be provided by something innate that constrains and guides the child in her construction of the grammar. The point is quite general: if the input, or data stream, is exiguous then (barring incredible luck) it is only possible for someone to arrive at the right theory about the data if they have some built-in inductive biases, some predispositions to form one kind of theory rather than another. And since any child can learn any human language, the innate endowment must put constraints on which of the countless logically possible languages are humanly possible.

If the features of human languages are limited by such innate, language-acquisition mechanisms, there is less scope for the large differences among languages that the more extreme linguistic relativists have imagined. But might linguistic universals leave room for less extreme versions of linguistic relativism that are still interesting? That depends on what linguistic devices there are and on their relationships to other cognitive mechanisms.

3.2 Modularity

From the perspective of nativist accounts of language, many of the questions about linguistic relativity boil down to questions about the informational encapsulation of mental modules. To say that a module is encapsulated means that other parts of the mind cannot influence its inner workings (though they can supply it with inputs and use its outputs). What are the implications of this for the linguistic relativist's claim that a person's language can exert a dramatic influence on his perception and thought?

The answer may be different for perception, on the one hand, and the higher mental processes, on the other. For example Jerry Fodor (1984) argues that there is a module (or modules) for visual perception and that information from other parts of the mind cannot influence it in the way that many psychologists have supposed. For example, even though I know that the two lines in the Müller-Lyer illusion

Müller-Lyer Illusion

are the same length, I cannot help seeing the line on the left as longer than the line on the right. I know the lengths are the same, but my visual module (or models) does not. It is encapsulated; this information can't get through to it, so it can't influence how I see the figure. If this is so, then linguistic information could not penetrate any vision modules, and so versions of linguistic relativism which hold (as most do) that our language can influence how we see things is wrong.

By contrast, Fodor holds that there is no special module for higher mental processes and, indeed, that we are a long way from having any account of how thinking and reasoning work (e.g., 2000). If this is right, then for all we know now, some aspects of linguistic relativism could be right. The workings of various linguistic modules might influence thought in interesting ways.

It bears stressing that many of the issues involving cognitive architecture are vigorously contested. Among other things, not all champions of modules see them as Fodor does. According to them what is special about visual modules may just be that they process visual information, not that they lack access to other kinds of information (indeed, top-down aspects of perception suggest that they often do have such access). If this is so, there is more room for language to influence perception and other cognitive processes than there is if modules are tightly insulated.

The dust here hasn't begun to settle, but one general moral is clear. If at least moderately strong nativist and modular views of the mind are on the right track--and there is now certainly some reason to think that they are--then many of the empirical issues about linguistic relativity will translate into issues concerning the ways in which various modules can influence one another.

4. Morals for other Independent Variables: Modularity and Encapsulation

We have gone into detail about the linguistic relativity hypothesis, because the main lessons here carry over to the study of the impact of other variables, e.g., culture, on cognition. Some of these emerged above; others are obvious once they are noted. They are

• Questions about the impact of a variable on cognition are empirical and causal questions.
• Such questions can only be answered with care once we specify which aspects of an independent variable, say culture, influence which aspects of thought and what form that influence takes.
• Such hypotheses can vary greatly in specificity, strength, and scope.
• Testing a specific version of the hypothesis requires a combination of skills, including those of a good ethnographer, linguist, and experimental psychologist.
• A comparison of more than two cultures is needed to draw any firm conclusions.
• The truth of specific hypotheses may turn on issues involving the modularity of mind and the degree of modular encapsulation.
• If the mind is highly modular, finding an influence of one aspect of language or culture of some aspect of cognition may tell us little about the influence of other aspects of language or culture on cognition.

These lessons are easier with some variables than with others. It is probably easiest with some aspects of language, because a good deal is now known about many of the languages of the world. It will often be more difficult in the case of culture, where things are more difficult to pin down than they are in the case of language. And it will be virtually impossible when history is the relevant variable; here much more speculative interpretations of historical documents may be the best we can do. But the basic point remains. Relativistic claims are empirical causal claims and they can only be settled by empirical evidence.

It is not always easy to strike the proper balance when thinking about empirical work on these matters. On the one hand it is useful to cultivate an “it-can't-be-that-simple” reflex for use when reading an isolated study or two. But on the other hand empirical investigation is the only thing that can answer many of the difficult questions about the complex, entangled processes of language, culture, and thought.

Return to Relativism: §1: A Framework for Relativism Return to Relativism: §2: Dependent Variables: What is Relative? Return to Relativism: §3: Independent Variables: Relative to What? Return to Relativism: §4: Arguments For Relativism Return to Relativism: §5: Arguments Against Relativism Return to Relativism: Table of Contents

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Neurolinguistic Relativity: How Language Flexes Human Perception and Cognition

Guillaume thierry.

1 School of Psychology and Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Bangor University

The time has come, perhaps, to go beyond merely acknowledging that language is a core manifestation of the workings of the human mind and that it relates interactively to all aspects of thinking. The issue, thus, is not to decide whether language and human thought may be ineluctably linked (they just are), but rather to determine what the characteristics of this relationship may be and to understand how language influences—and may be influenced by—nonverbal information processing. In an attempt to demystify linguistic relativity, I review neurolinguistic studies from our research group showing a link between linguistic distinctions and perceptual or conceptual processing. On the basis of empirical evidence showing effects of terminology on perception, language‐idiosyncratic relationships in semantic memory, grammatical skewing of event conceptualization, and unconscious modulation of executive functioning by verbal input, I advocate a neurofunctional approach through which we can systematically explore how languages shape human thought.

Introduction

Think of a frog. Even better, perhaps, don't. Here, language—in this case, a noun supported by a verb—will have prompted a thought in your mind. Does language have a strong relationship to thought? The second instruction above (don't think of a frog) is perhaps an even better illustration of the link: Not only does language appear inherently and implacably connected to thought, but the connection seems to escape our control entirely. It is impossible for one not to think of something called up by language. Thus, language triggers thought, and it does so whether we like it or not, provided we are familiar with the code. Language is undoubtedly one of the most exquisitely sophisticated and powerful products of the human mind. Its importance in the development of human civilization, society, and science hardly needs introducing or highlighting. Even though the language‐thought binding contingency appears intuitive to many, some scholars and thinkers have dismissed the premises of linguistic relativity—an equally intuitive correlate of the contingency—as linguistic idealism (see Jackson, 1991 ).

Casasanto ( 2008 ) reminds us that language is naturally not the same as thought, because thought preexists language, both ontologically and phylogenetically. Animals manifest forms of cognitive processing (e.g., perception, attention, memory, problem solving, planning, adaptive execution) that resemble thought processes seen in humans (e.g., Gallistel, 1989 ). Preverbal infants anticipate, direct their attention, draw inferences, and thus manifest thought outside language (Feigenson, Dehaene, & Spelke, 2004 ; Gordon, 2004 ). But after having agreed that we must leave the idea of a language‐thought equivalence behind, we are not yet out of the woods. We can still come across the “big bad Whorf” (Casasanto, 2008 ). One thing is to recognize that thought exists outside language and thus that it likely coexists with language. Another is to wander at the other end of a conceptual continuum and consider that thought might be entirely independent of language. Does Pinker ( 2007 ) use a strawman strategy to counter and ridicule the linguistic relativity hypothesis? If language does not equate thought, must we readily adopt the extreme opposite view and consider language‐thought independence as a de facto alternative? That is wrong, though, all wrong. Thinking that language may be entirely disconnected from thought is an example of what deserves to be called reductio ad absurdum .

People who speak different languages appear to conceive of the world somewhat differently and diversity of thought, perspective, and innovation seem intuitively linked to naturally occurring language diversity. Why is it, then, that many scholars in science, linguistics, and philosophy (perhaps in these fields more than elsewhere) are skeptical, if not overtly critical, of the idea that languages may go hand in hand with different ways of not only conceiving and paying attention to the world, but also literally holding different perceptions? Perhaps the most basic argument against a strong language‐thought binding contingency concerns the commonly advocated existence of universal concepts. If such concepts exist, then thought must be separable from language. But then, reciprocally, if language is narrowly married to thought, and if together they are somewhat idiosyncratic to each and every human mind, how do we know that universal concepts are indeed universal? For instance, Jackson ( 1991 ) asks, “Can the French not tell the difference between sheep and mutton, because they only have one word for them?” (p. 209). Indeed, even though native speakers of French use the label mouton for both the meat derived from the sheep and the animal itself, they can conceptualize this distinction. If the meat–animal distinction is shared by native speakers of both French and English, then language arguably fails to shift the concept. However, because French and English differ in the way they refer to the meat and the animal it derives from, one can reasonably hypothesize that this distinction is, in fact, conceptually different for the speakers of the two languages (e.g., a sheep may be considered more primarily as a source of food by French speakers than English speakers). We thus find ourselves prisoners of a circular reasoning loop: Language and thought seem bound up with one another, but then there appear to be shared concepts that transcend language diversity. We cannot, however, be sure that these concepts are shared if we cannot conceptualize something independently of a particular language or languages, and so on.

Such circular reasoning has profoundly hindered progress in characterizing the nature of the language‐thought binding contingency and partly explains the stark skepticism that has stigmatized linguistic relativity. Breaking out of the loop thus requires a demonstration that language and thought are intertwined even when one ventures into territories of human cognition that are as far from language as we can conceive. One such territory is perception. Indeed, empirical research testing the linguistic relativity hypothesis has progressively drifted toward the testing of nonverbal perception, in the hopes of identifying processing differences that do not trivially derive or relate to (consciously accessible) language distinctions, but that can rationally and indirectly be linked to the same. However, such empirical studies (e.g., Boroditsky, 2000 , 2001 ; Gentner, Imai, & Boroditsky, 2002 ; Lupyan, 2008 ; Lupyan & Spivey, 2010 ; Meteyard, Bahrami, & Vigliocco, 2007 ) have failed to convince the skeptics (e.g., Gleitman & Papafragou, 2005 ; Klemfuss, Prinzmetal, & Ivry, 2012 ; Pinker, 2007 ), perhaps because (a) they hardly ever avoid language reference entirely, (b) they fail to test perception, or (c) because of a combination of (a) and (b).

Studies relying on behavioral measures (such as reaction times and response patterns) are notoriously susceptible to verbal interference and late, postperceptual strategic effects, which may explain why reports of such effects are often followed by publications of counterevidence or null effects studying the same contrasts (e.g., Firestone & Scholl, 2014 ; January & Kako, 2007 ). Humans can (and do) silently verbalize all the time and thus responses from conscious decisions in supposedly nonverbal perceptual tasks can never be deemed free of verbal contamination. Rather than having differently structured minds, then, speakers of different languages may have their behavior nudged by grammar or terminology in ways that reflect properties of their native language (Pinker, 1997 ). This pertinent criticism applies to most empirical studies that attempt to draw conclusions from behavioral measures. How, then, can potential effects of language structure on perception be tested? This requires an investigation method that can tackle stages of mental processing that are sufficiently early, unconscious, and automatic, so as to not be directly affected by online aspects of language processing. There is thus no alternative but to test the hypothesis using physiological correlates of perception that derive from brain activity.

A fully interactive, nonselective account of human brain physiology is largely inconsistent with modular views positing a given faculty (such as language) as encapsulated and relatively independent vis‐à‐vis other specialized brain systems such as perception, object categorization, or motor control (Barsalou, 2008 ). As highlighted by Pulvermüller ( 1999 ) and in line with the theoretical tenets of connectionism and Hebbian theory (Hebb, 1949 ), the human brain is a richly connected network of neurons, in which functional subnetworks recruit distributed cells firing in coincidence (cell assemblies) rather than anatomically and/or functionally distinct modules. If one considers that connectivity within the brain—involving forward connections and feedback loops—spans the entire cortex and internal ganglia, it soon becomes evident that making a distinction between language and the rest of the mind is essentially meaningless. Making such a distinction implies that language and mind are two ensembles that can be delimited, as if one could draw a line between the two, or trace a line around language within the mind. This is misleading both from an anatomical and a neurophysiological viewpoint. First, it is well established that high‐level executive functions such as planning and attention modulate perceptual processing at the most basic levels of processing (McAdams & Reid, 2005 ). Second, to this day, there is little or no evidence for language‐specific regions in the human brain (Démonet, Thierry, & Cardebat, 2005 ; Price, Thierry, & Griffiths, 2005 ). Indeed, areas of the cerebral cortex, inner ganglia, and cerebellum involved in language processing are also activated by various nonverbal auditory and visual stimuli presented in a variety of experimental contexts (e.g., Thierry, Giraud, & Price, 2003 ; Thierry & Price, 2006 ). Even though some recent studies have offered evidence in favor of what may be construed as microselectivity in areas often associated with language processing (Fedorenko, Duncan, & Kanwisher, 2012 ), the spatial and temporal resolution of functional neuroimaging remains largely insufficient to establish any selectivity at the macrostructural level. Third, there is no shortage of empirical evidence showing interaction between language and other perceptual‐cognitive processes, such as emotion (Wu & Thierry, 2012 ), decision making (Costa, Foucart, Arnon, Aparici, & Apesteguia, 2014 ; Gao, Zika, Rogers, & Thierry, 2015 ; Keysar, Hayakawa, & An, 2012 ), or inhibitory control (Wu & Thierry, 2013 ).

In sum, neurophysiology and cognitive neuroscience suggest that language and thought are intrinsically bound together, and thus that language likely influences thought. An example of the mechanism through which this can occur is the label‐feedback hypothesis put forward by Lupyan ( 2012 ). Lupyan proposed that a category name becomes associated with distinctive features of the category it denotes as soon as it is learned. The activation of this name or label then results in the modulation of lower‐level perceptual processes via feedback looping, filtering, and improving the bottom‐up flow of information through the perceptual system. Naming an object would thus lead to more categorical and less idiosyncratic representations and effectively lead to the perceptual grouping of objects denoted by the same category label. This model, however, makes the strong assumption that language representations (and the neural network underpinning them) modulate low‐level perceptual processing in real time rather than by means of more durable structural and functional reorganizations. Furthermore, the label‐feedback hypothesis accounts for lexical effects, but says little or nothing about the impact on perception of other structural properties of language such as grammar and syntax. If the language–thought binding contingency seems obvious and pervasive from a cognitive neuroscience perspective, why spend time demonstrating its existence? I would argue that relativist research has two main objectives: (a) characterizing the nature of the effects and mechanisms through which language influences other aspects of cognition and (b) establishing whether there exist conditions in which thought may actually be independent of language.

As long as the phenomena studied empirically in linguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive science require, or merely encourage, conscious processing and verbalization, it will be impossible to establish an effect of language on nonverbal thinking. Progress thus requires evidence that minimizes the chances of a contamination by explicit top‐down strategies, which are likely to prompt language processing (overtly or implicitly) during tasks that are supposedly nonverbal. In this sense, most behavioral studies provide insufficient evidence, because the effects reported can always be construed as a mere effect of language on language (Pinker, 2007 ; Slobin, 1996 ). The need for a neurophysiological approach becomes more and more clear: Observing modulations of neural activity relating to perceptual or unconscious evaluation of nonverbal stimuli that can be predicted on the basis of definitional, contrasting properties of languages must be the best evidence that language shapes human thought.

I am hopeful that this outlook challenges the idea that there are instances in which language stands alone, disconnected from perception, attention, memory, executive control, or thought, whatever definition one chooses to lend them. Here, I discuss findings from three domains of research, which I believe strongly undermine the idea that language may stand apart from the rest of our cognitive make‐up: (a) color and object categorization, (b) motion conceptualization, and (c) executive function.

Color and Object Categorization

The firm determination to submit to experiment is not enough; there are still dangerous hypotheses; first, and above all, those which are tacit and unconscious. Since we make them without knowing it, we are powerless to abandon them. (Henri Poincaré, 1913 , p. 134)

Notwithstanding the disputable nature of conclusions from behavioral studies relying solely on overt decision data, a host of recent studies have convincingly demonstrated that lexical and grammatical information affects domain‐general cognitive processes. For example, color terminology has been shown to influence categorical perception of color in monolingual and bilingual speakers (Franklin et al., 2008 ; Gilbert, Regier, Kay, & Ivry, 2006 ). Athanasopoulos and colleagues, in particular, have provided empirical evidence that native speakers of Greek, who in their language have two basic color terms for light and dark blue ( ghalazio and ble ), perceive these two shades of blue as more distinct than do native speakers of English, whose language has only the basic color term blue (Athanasopoulos, 2009 ; Athanasopoulos, Damjanovic, Krajciova, & Sasaki, 2011 ). Such effects have been found both in tasks inviting participants to identify prototypical colors corresponding to a particular term and similarity judgment tasks (Athanasopoulos et al., 2011 ).

To address the core question of possible online access to language representations during overt behavioral tasks requiring conscious evaluation of color features, we chose to record event‐related brain potentials in participants, who were monitoring colored shapes in a very simple shape detection task. Event‐related potentials (ERPs) are derived from electroencephalographic (EEG) activity recorded continuously throughout an experimental session from the surface of the scalp of a participant, who is usually presented with a series of visual or auditory stimuli. Real‐time continuous EEG is essentially impossible to interpret as is, at least when it comes to making inferences about the cognitive processes involved. In order to purify the activity specific to a given stimulus category or cognitive operation, the continuous EEG recording is split into epochs, using stimulus onset time as a temporal reference. By averaging EEG signals collected over several trials (generally at least 30), brain activity that is unrelated to the particular stimulus presented or the particular cognitive operation performed by the participant is blurred and tends to fade into background activity, whereas those variations of electrical potentials that specifically relate to the stimuli presented tend to be repeated from one trial to the next and thus to be revealed through averaging. ERPs offer a unique opportunity to study the average modulation of activity produced by the brain in response to a class of stimuli and/or a particular cognitive task. The temporal resolution of the method is very high (in the order of the millisecond), but it provides little or no information regarding the source of the signal in the brain.

We presented native speakers of Greek and English with streams of simple shapes (mostly circles and, infrequently, squares) filled in light blue, dark blue, light green, or dark green and instructed them to press a designated button when they saw a square. Participants’ attention was thus drawn to shape rather than color. Such an experimental procedure, the so‐called oddball paradigm, has been used extensively both in the auditory and the visual modalities to study an automatic and unconscious response of the brain to stimulus perceptual deviance (a detectable difference between frequent and rare stimuli)—mismatch negativity (Czigler, 2014 ; Näätänen, Kujala, & Winkler, 2011 ). We predicted that the existence of two basic color terms in Greek for light blue and dark blue would result in a visual mismatch negativity (vMMN) of larger magnitude for the blue contrast than the green contrast. The light green/dark green contrast was used as a control condition, because Greek (like English) has only one basic color term for green ( prasino ). Therefore, we expected the contrast between light green and dark green to elicit vMMNs of similar magnitude in the two groups. And, indeed, we found the predicted three‐way interaction between participant group, color hue, and stimulus deviancy (Thierry, Athanasopoulos, Wiggett, Dering, & Kuipers, 2009 ). We concluded that a lexical distinction in a given language leads to greater perceptual discrimination in individuals who possess this distinction, as compared to speakers of a language that lacks the distinction. We argued that this effect is not linked to online activation of verbal representations in the mind of the participant (see below), but rather constitutes evidence for a perceptual distinction established through repeated exposure to color terms that constantly highlight color contrasts.

Some of our reviewers and a number of colleagues raised questions at the time about this finding, most notably: (a) How do we know that the process is unconscious? (b) Why could this not be explained by online lexical access, the result being another example of online effects of language that do not imply the long‐term shaping of nonverbal representations by language? and (c) How do we know that the effects found are not merely due to the different environments in which the individuals of the two compared groups were raised? In other words, how do we know that this is not merely a question of environmental experience rather than a genuine effect of terminology and language use? Here are tentative answers to these questions:

• We debriefed our participants very carefully at the end of each experiment, and we were surprised to discover that most failed to recall that standard stimuli (circles) could have different colors within any given block. Most did recall (correctly) that squares could change color (i.e., be light blue or dark blue within a block), but they failed to remember that the circles, too, could change color within a block, even though this was the perceptual change at the origin of the vMMN. The fact that participants could not recall the critical manipulation at the origin of the vMMN modulation suggests that they were not paying much attention to the critical stimuli and that the processing of color deviancy was mostly automatic.
• Studies of online speech production using ERPs have shown that participants in optimal conditions (after training) show the earliest effects of lexical frequency at around 200 milliseconds after stimulus onset in picture naming (Costa, Strijkers, Martin, & Thierry, 2009 ; Strijkers, Costa, & Thierry, 2010 ). In addition, when participants are not required to name pictures, but rather make semantic decisions about them, lexical frequency effects are observed much later, presumably because lexical properties of picture names are not critical to perform a semantic decision task (Strijkers, Holcomb, & Costa, 2012 ). Taken together, these studies suggest that specific lexical information is only available after 200 milliseconds following the presentation of a picture, even when picture names have been practiced and naming is directly required. The vMMN effect recorded in Thierry et al. ( 2009 ) started before 200 milliseconds and occurred in circumstances when the critical stimuli required no naming, let alone full perceptual evaluation, which suggests that it was not under online influence of language representations. Furthermore, when we investigated the latency and amplitude of the P1 (an early peak of ERPs classically associated with early visual processing), we again found a striking dissociation between groups: British participants showed a close overlap of amplitude and latencies between P1s elicited by stimuli of matched lightness (light blue and green on the one hand, and dark blue and green on the other), but Greek participants showed a marked P1 dissociation between the four stimuli as well as substantially increased variance. These differences are very unlikely to be reducible to online effect of language processing.
• Greek participants were likely to have experienced different shades of blue in their lives compared to locally sourced native speakers of English, given the marked meteorological contrasts between Greece and Wales. However, and even though this is not a definitive argument, the environment in Wales and the United Kingdom generally boasts an extraordinary palette of green shades, whereas the same can hardly be said of blue which is, after all, rather infrequent in the United Kingdom. Therefore, if the larger vMMN contrast found for blue than green in the native Greek participants could be accounted for by the naturally occurring variety of blue shades in the environment in Greece, one could reasonably predict a larger vMMN contrast for green than blue in the British participant group. However, this was not observed in our data.

Shortly after the publication of this first study, we realized that our Greek group of 20 participants could be split into two groups of 10 with markedly different lengths of stay in the United Kingdom. We thus set out to test whether a longer stay in the United Kingdom, naturally correlated with increased proficiency in English, would lead to a reduction in the vMMN effect, because the use of the word blue to refer to both ghalazio and ble might have led to a dimming of the perceptual contrast between the two colors. We compared three groups: 10 native speakers of Greek who had spent an average of 7.2 months (5–12) in the United Kingdom (short stay), 10 native speakers of Greek who had spent an average of 42.6 months (18–60) in the United Kingdom (long stay), and a group of 10 native speakers of English randomly selected from the 20 tested in the 2009 study. Recalculated vMMN results in the new participant groupings revealed that dark and light blues were not only perceived as more similar by long‐stay Greek participants, but the vMMN effect elicited by the blue contrast was also markedly reduced, as compared to that elicited in short‐stay bilinguals (Athanasopoulos, Dering, Wiggett, Kuipers, & Thierry, 2010 ). These results strongly suggest that terminology not only drives categorical distinction at a perceptual level, but also that this process is eminently plastic in nature, modulated by language exposure and usage.

Following these studies in the domain of color perception, we wondered if a similar phenomenon could be observed in the domain of object categorization. In collaboration with Bastien Boutonnet, we designed an experiment similar to the color study contrasting pictures of cups and mugs, one picture being the frequently presented standard and the other being the infrequent deviant (Boutonnet, Dering, Viñas‐Guasch, & Thierry, 2013 ). Infrequent pictures depicting a bowl were the targets, which participants had to detect by pressing a button. We tested 14 native speakers of English, who had no difficulty naming the objects as cup and mug and 13 native speakers of Spanish in Spain, who all called both objects taza . We predicted a two‐way interaction between group and deviancy, such that the vMMN difference between cups and mugs would be greater in the English natives than the Spanish natives. Indeed, we found essentially no vMMN amplitude difference between cups and mugs in the Spanish group and a significant difference in native speakers of English. It must be kept in mind that ERP markers of perceptual differences between objects differentiated the two categories reliably in both groups of participants, that is, the P1 peak of ERPs elicited by cups and mugs, averaged irrespective of frequency status in the oddball experiment, elicited a P1 difference that was very similar in the two groups, showing that the two objects were perceived as different, and to a similar extent by speakers of each language. Indeed, it would be ludicrous to think that because two objects are named using the same word, they could be taken to be visually indistinguishable. However, during early stages of visual categorization, these objects are less distinguishable among individuals who use the same term to designate them than those who usually use distinct terms, and in that sense, it remains fundamentally a question of perception.

Effects such as those reviewed above are eminently predictable for one who is positively predisposed toward the premises of the linguistic relativity hypothesis: A difference in terminology relates to a difference in perceptual processing. A stronger argument in favor of linguistic relativity, then, would be to identify not merely concepts that can be distinguished on the basis of specific lexical contrasts, but rather concepts that are related in a nontrivial fashion, for instance, due to the existence of links that exist at a predominantly linguistic level and have relatively low incidence at a conceptual level. The concepts of horse and sea , for instance, can be considered only mildly related from a conceptual viewpoint and probably not more so than bike and sea . Horse and sea , however, are formally related in English through the existence of the compound word seahorse . In the study by Boutonnet, McClain, and Thierry ( 2014 ), we tested whether such relations between words idiosyncratic to a language would yield predictable links between corresponding nonverbal representations and concepts. We presented participants undergoing ERP recordings with picture pairs that were either related in meaning, unrelated in meaning, or arbitrarily related because of the existence of a compound word comprising the names of the objects depicted by the two pictures. We quantified picture‐to‐picture priming using the N400, a wave of ERP known to be modulated in amplitude by semantic priming (Kutas & Federmeier, 2011 ). As expected, we found that related pictures elicited an N400 of reduced mean amplitude as compared to unrelated pictures. Surprisingly, however, while pictures derived from words forming a compound and presented in the same order (as in sea – horse ) elicited an N400 response similar to unrelated pictures, the N400 was significantly reduced when the pictures were presented in the reverse order (as in horse – sea ). We interpreted this result as evidence that the two concepts (e.g., horse and sea ), presented nonverbally and visually, are abnormally related in semantic memory, because they primed one another to a greater extent than otherwise unrelated concepts (e.g., horse and smoke ), probably due to the existence of a compound word crystallizing a formal link within the lexicon (e.g., seahorse ). It may be surprising that we did not find such priming effect when the pictures were presented in the same order as words within the corresponding compound (e.g., sea – horse ). We interpreted these findings as a clash between conceptual priming and access to the meaning of the actual compound (e.g., seahorse ), which was unrelated and thus conflicted with the concepts activated by the pictures. This study broke new ground in neurolinguistic approaches to linguistic relativity by revealing semantic associations between concepts driven mainly by lexical relations idiosyncratic to a particular language and thus nontrivially reliant on the signifiant – signifié relationship of Saussure (Saussure, Bally, Sechehaye, & Riedlinger, 1916 ).

Motion Conceptualization

Users of markedly different grammars […] are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world. (Benjamin Lee Whorf, 1956 , p. 221)

One essential question, much closer to Whorf's original speculations, is whether effects of language on perception through a mind‐shaping effect of grammar could be more entrenched than those originating in terminology. Beyond linguistic observations suggesting that grammatical number and grammatical gender may alter object categorization in observers of different languages (Athanasopoulos & Kasai, 2008 ; Boutonnet, Athanasopoulos, & Thierry, 2012 ; Cubelli, Paolieri, Lotto, & Job, 2011 ; Saalbach, Imai, & Schalk, 2012 ), a paradigm that has attracted a lot of attention is that of motion perception, because of the rich diversity of the way in which different languages deal with, for example, path, goal, direction, and manner of motion.

Some languages (e.g., English) tend to encode manner of motion within the verb (compare to walk and to stroll , or to run and to sprint ) whereas others (e.g., French; Talmy, 1985 ) will more often optionally encode manner through the addition of adverbs (compare marcher and marcher lentement , or courrir and courrir très vite , which are tentative French translations of the previously exemplified English verbs). Apart from the fact that individuals who speak a manner‐oriented language will (rather expectedly) be more inclined to linguistically encode manner when describing motion events (Papafragou, Hulbert, & Trueswell, 2008 ), the features of the language have been suggested to mildly influence behavior in eye‐tracking experiments (Flecken, Carroll, Weimar, & von Stutterheim, 2015 ; Papafragou et al., 2008 ) and in a variety of categorization, matching, and recognition tasks (Gennari, Sloman, Malt, & Fitch, 2002 ; Kersten et al., 2010 ; Papafragou, Massey, & Gleitman, 2002 ).

Another key example of the way in which grammatical idiosyncrasies of different languages affect linguistic encoding strategies and, correlatively, conceptualization of motion events, pertains to the domain of grammatical aspect. Studies by von Stutterheim and Nüse (2013), von Stutterheim, Andermann, Carroll, Flecken, and Schmiedtova ( 2012 ), and Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll ( 2014 ), for instance, have shown a relationship between grammatical aspect and attention to endpoints when individuals observe motion. Indeed, languages can be distinguished on the basis of their systematic or optional encoding of aspect within verbs (Slobin, 2006 ). When asked to describe an incomplete motion event (e.g., a video clip showing a woman walking on a road toward a car but not reaching the vehicle), speakers of nonaspect languages (e.g., German or Swedish) tend to specify the action's goal, or the endpoint, as compared to speakers of aspect languages (e.g., English or French), who tend to keep to the description of the motion itself and are thus less likely to mention the endpoint (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014 ; Bylund, Athanasopoulos, & Oostendorp, 2013 ).

Perhaps the most radical demonstration of the impact of language aspect on conceptualization is that recently offered by Athanasopoulos et al. ( 2015 ) who showed how fluent German‐English bilinguals can switch back and forth between the goal‐orientation preference of native speakers of either of their two languages, depending on language context. Strikingly, when bilingual German‐English participants are asked to perform a verbal interference task (counting backwards) in either English or German while categorizing video clips depicting motion events, they display the goal‐orientation preference of the language not in use, as if that language was available to shape selection behavior!

While substantial behavioral evidence is now available to show that motion event conceptualization depends on the properties of the native language and the immediate language context, it remains the case that observing motion events depicted by video clips or monitoring of eye movements using eye‐tracking during stimulus observation cannot exclude covert verbalization, and thus the possibility of online influences of language, which again raises the spectre of the effect of language on language criticism. Here, too, more compelling evidence in support of the strong relativist viewpoint (Gentner & Goldin‐Meadow, 2003 ; Gumperz & Levinson, 1996 ; Lucy, 1997 ) must come from cognitive neurolinguistics, using experimental procedures that are less susceptible to covert language involvement and that rely on direct neurophysiological measures of cognitive processing more readily linked to conceptualization.

In a recent study by Flecken, Athanasopoulos, Kuipers, and Thierry ( 2015 ), this was precisely what we aimed to do. We presented two groups of native speakers of German or English with video animations of a black dot travelling along a trajectory (straight or curved) toward a shape (square or hexagon). Given that speakers of English, an aspect‐language, are drawn to pay attention equally to trajectory and endpoint, whereas speakers of German, a nonaspect language, tend to pay more attention to endpoints, we expected the perceptual saliency of the endpoint to be greater in native speakers of German than native speakers of English. We engaged our participants in a motion event‐picture matching task in which animations were used as primes and were followed by picture targets symbolizing the motion events. In 75% of trials, the animation prime (e.g., dot moving along a straight line toward a square) was followed by a target picture featuring both a mismatched trajectory (e.g., a curve) and a mismatched endpoint shape (e.g., a hexagon; mismatch condition); in 10% of trials, the trajectory depicted in the picture target matched that of the dot in the animation prime (trajectory match); in 10% of trials, the shape in the picture target matched the endpoint shape of the animation prime (endpoint shape match); and in only 5% of trials, both the trajectory and the endpoint shape matched that of the animation prime (full match). Participants were instructed to press a button only in the full match condition. This design conformed to that of an oddball paradigm geared toward probing conceptualization and conscious monitoring because the relevant animation characteristics (trajectory and endpoint) were directly relevant for task completion. We thus expected to see a P3b wave of event‐related brain potentials in the full‐match condition, because this wave is well known to index conscious detection of infrequent target stimuli among frequent stimuli. Critically, the amplitude of the P3 elicited in partial match conditions served as an index of the perceived importance of trajectory and endpoint information, respectively. Endpoint‐match stimuli elicited greater P3 amplitude than trajectory‐match stimuli in native speakers of German tested in Germany, but no differences between the P3s elicited by endpoint‐match and trajectory‐match stimuli were found in native speakers of English tested in the United Kingdom. Furthermore, a behavioral testing procedure conducted in similar language groups failed to show any performance difference between groups. This study is probably the first to show that grammatical properties of the native language affect motion event conceptualization in a systematic fashion, even when language involvement is unlikely, given the nature of the stimuli and task, and when categorization behavior is not overtly biased by the instructions.

Executive Function

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. (George Orwell, 1946 , p. 167)

Beyond effects of language on perception and categorization, a critical question is whether language can influence or even constrain aspects of executive function and action selection. Language experience is known to affect cognitive abilities. For example, bilinguals have been shown to outperform monolinguals in a number of nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., the Simon task and the Attention Network Test) that measure various aspects of executive function (Bialystok, Craik, Klein, & Viswanathan, 2004 ; Costa, Hernández, & Sebastián‐Gallés, 2008 ). One explanation for this apparent advantage is that managing two languages requires constant selection of words in the intended language and inhibition of words from the unintended language, processes that are thought to engender a highly efficient control mechanism (Bialystok & Feng, 2009 ; Green & Abutalebi, 2013 ). However, groups of bilinguals and monolinguals differ not only in language ability but also in other respects, such as socioeconomic status or ethnic origin and, indeed, these factors have been suggested to account for the bilingual advantage (Costa, Hernández, Costa‐Faidella, & Sebastián‐Gallés, 2009 ; Morton & Harper, 2007 ; Sabbagh, Xu, Carlson, Moses, & Lee, 2006 ). Unlike monolinguals, bilinguals can either use only a single language (monolingual context) or both their languages (bilingual context) in any given interaction. If bilingualism bestows a generic and sustained executive control advantage to bilinguals, enhanced cognitive control should be observed independently of language context. If, on the contrary, the advantage is context dependent, enhancement should be greater in a bilingual than in a monolingual context.

Wu and Thierry ( 2013 ) tested whether language context modulates executive functioning in Welsh‐English bilinguals by measuring interference in an adapted version of the flanker task (Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz, & Posner, 2002 ). Participants were instructed to report the direction of a central arrow (i.e., the target) surrounded by congruent or incongruent flanker arrows. Occasionally, instead of arrows, participants were presented with a word, which they were instructed to ignore. The experiment contained three blocks in which the contextual words to be ignored were in Welsh, in English, or in either of the two languages. Whereas the cognitive interference caused by incongruent trials was of similar magnitude when intervening words were all in one language or the other within a block, the amount of interference decreased (and thus participants were better able to manage incongruent trials) when contextual words were randomly presented in English and Welsh. This study was the first to demonstrate a direct influence of language context on executive function within the same bilingual individuals, which means that inhibitory control can be modulated by simply presenting participants with a mix of words from their two languages, even when word stimuli are irrelevant and participants are instructed to ignore them.

In the domain of decision making, language has been found to influence cognitive and emotional processes that mediate departures from normatively rational choice (Keysar et al., 2012 ). This is due in part to the fact that language can modify one's emotional state, which in turn can affect various aspects of decision making (Damasio, 1996 ; De Martino, Kumaran, Seymour, & Dolan, 2006 ). Damasio ( 1996 ) provided compelling clinical evidence that emotion is an integral component of decision making that can lead to suboptimal decisions or even indecision. On the other hand, mental representations are known to be sensitive to established language‐emotion interactions. Wu and Thierry ( 2012 ), for instance, reported inhibition of access to native lexical representations by emotionally negative words presented in the second language of Chinese‐English bilinguals: When presented with pairs of English words that concealed a Chinese character repetition in their Chinese translation, a well‐established effect of unconscious access to native translation equivalent representation (Thierry & Wu, 2007 ; Wu & Thierry, 2010 ) was not found if the prime word had a negative affective valence, but the anticipated priming was found when primes were affectively positive or neutral. This suggests that emotional aspects of people's decision making, sometimes associated with suboptimal choices, may be susceptible to the language context in which they operate.

Keysar and colleagues ( 2012 ), who investigated language‐cognition interactions in decision making under risk, showed how using a foreign language modulates framing and loss aversion when participants choose between risky and safe prospects. In their native language, participants displayed standard risk aversion for dilemmas emphasizing gains, on the one hand, and risk‐seeking behavior for dilemmas emphasizing losses, on the other, but they did not do so in their second language. This and other findings (e.g., Costa et al., 2014 ) show that making decisions in a second language moderates peoples’ risk‐attitudes by underweighting larger gains and losses, which is consistent with the framing effect (Tversky & Kahneman, 1981 ), and equalizes the impact of good and bad choice outcomes, thus modulating loss aversion (Tversky & Kahneman, 1992 ). Note that, in real settings, decisions are often sequenced together such that good or bad outcomes of given trials influence subsequent choices (Osborn & Jackson, 1988 ; Thaler & Johnson, 1990 ) and this can happen even when decision outcome is unpredictable or random as, for example, in the case of the Hot Hand Fallacy, in which random events with a positive outcome are wrongly interpreted as reflecting a winning streak (Ayton & Fischer, 2004 ).

Gao et al. ( 2015 ) tested whether risk taking would be modulated by language‐based feedback when participants repeatedly chose between playing and leaving (not playing) 50/50 gambles to win small monetary rewards. The choices were presented in numeric form, but the outcome was presented using adjectives with positive and negative valence in the participants’ first language (Chinese) or second language (English). We modeled the effects of presenting feedback, indicating good and bad outcome in either Chinese or English, upon participants’ subsequent decisions to play. In addition, we used ERPs to investigate a possible link between the neural correlates of language processing and the processing of decision outcomes themselves based on modulation of the feedback‐related negativity (FRN). The FRN is a frontally distributed negative deflection of ERPs, which typically peaks between 250 and 300 milliseconds after the onset of feedback stimulus and is sensitive to feedback valence, that is, how good or bad outcomes turn out to be (Gehring & Willoughby, 2002 ; Holroyd & Coles, 2002 ; Miltner, Braun, & Coles, 1997 ). Because emotional sensitivity has been shown to differ in the first and second language of bilinguals (Harris, Aycicegi, & Gleason, 2003 ), we hypothesized that feedback words in English would elicit an FRN smaller in amplitude than their Chinese equivalents, in turn affecting risk‐taking behavior. While positive feedback incited participants to play more on the next trial than negative feedback, we found a striking dissociation between languages, such that positive feedback in the native language (Chinese) incited participants to take 10% more gambles (i.e., more risk) on the next trial, as compared to all other conditions. This striking effect of language context was further supported by correlations between differences in FRN amplitude between language of feedback and differences in probabilities of playing. In other words, expressions that appear to convey the same message appear to have a profoundly different effect on decision making, depending on whether they are presented in the native or the second language of bilinguals, showing that interactions between language and decision making should not be taken lightly.

There is now substantial neurophysiological evidence validating psycholinguistic data and theoretical linguistic accounts of linguistic relativity: Language(s), human perception, and aspects of cognition that may be construed as nonverbal interact in a rich and complex fashion. At the forefront of the current inquiry in this field is the question of the causal role of language and the depth of its pervasive influence on thinking. The studies reviewed above show that lexical and grammatical distinctions between languages affect elementary aspects of color and object perception, or motion conceptualization, and support the positive interpretation of results from behavioral experiments that have tested premises of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Notwithstanding the debate among linguists regarding the existence of language universals (Evans & Levinson, 2009 ; von Fintel & Matthewson, 2008 ), a neurolinguistic approach can offer answers without requiring systematic comparison of all the many languages of the world. In addition to providing insights from within a particular language, the neurolinguistic approach allows us to characterize the nature of the relationship between formal aspects of language, perception, and concepts on the basis of unbiased physiological measurements rather than human performance in behavioral tasks prone to inciting metacognitive evaluation and thus susceptible to interpretative muddling.

Many questions remain unanswered. In fact, accepting the linguistic relativity hypothesis raises many new and fascinating questions: Is language and its particular forms not only sufficient, but also essential to the existence of certain perceptual distinctions? How reliable are such distinctions without language encoding? Are different types of learning—implicit or explicit—differently affected by language? How does language interact with other extralinguistic variables in shaping human cognition? How are the effects of differing linguistic codes reconciled in the multilingual mind? Does language proficiency directly or indirectly impact conceptual organization? How do languages and sociocultural conceptions interact in shaping human civilization? One can only hope that future research will progressively unveil such mechanisms and establish how strategic language use can better assist human learning, cognitive development, and decision making.

The copyright line for this article was changed on 19 August 2016 after original online publication

I wish to thank Marilyn Vihman, Panos Athanasopoulos, and Manne Bylund, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their attentive reading of this manuscript and for their highly constructive comments that have led to considerable improvements. A number of the empirical studies reviewed here were made possible by funding received from the UK Economic and Social Research Council (Centre for Research on Bilingualism in Theory and Practice, ES/E024556/1), the European Research Council (Starting Investigator Grant, ERC‐SG‐209704), and the British Academy (Mid‐Career Fellowship award, BA‐MD120036).

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Linguistic Relativity

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Linguistic Relativity by Peggy Li , David Barner LAST REVIEWED: 28 October 2011 LAST MODIFIED: 28 October 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199772810-0026

Linguistic relativity, sometimes called the Whorfian hypothesis, posits that properties of language affect the structure and content of thought and thus the way humans perceive reality. A distinction is often made between strong Whorfian views, according to which the categories of thought are determined by language, and weak views, which argue that language influences thought without entirely determining its structure. Each view presupposes that for language to affect thought, the two must in some way be separable. The modern investigation of linguistic relativity began with the contributions of Benjamin Lee Whorf and his mentor, Edward Sapir. Until recently, much experimental work has focused on determining whether any reliable Whorfian effects exist and whether effects truly reflect differences in thought caused by linguistic variation. Many such studies compare speakers of different languages or test subjects at different stages of language acquisition. Other studies explore how language affects cognition by testing prelinguistic infants or nonhuman animals and comparing these groups to children or adults. Significant progress has been made in several domains, including studies of color, number, objects, and space. In many areas, the status of findings is hotly debated.

Often, leading researchers in the field summarize their newest findings and views in edited collections. These volumes are good places to begin research into the topic of linguistic relativity. The listed volumes arose from papers presented at conferences, symposia, and workshops devoted to the topic. Gumperz and Levinson 1996 arose from a symposium that revived interest in the linguistic relativity hypothesis, leading to a wave of new research on the topic. Highlights of this work are reported in Bowerman and Levinson 2001 , Gentner and Goldin-Meadow 2003 , and Malt and Wolff 2010 .

Bowerman, Melissa, and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 2001. Language acquisition and conceptual development . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511620669

This volume brings together research on language acquisition and conceptual development and asks about the relation between them in early childhood.

Gentner, Dedre, and Susan Goldin-Meadow, eds. 2003. Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

The volume starts with a collection of perspective papers and then showcases papers that bring data to bear to test claims of linguistic relativity. The papers are delineated on the basis of the types of language effects on thought: language as a tool kit, language as a lens, and language as a category maker.

Gumperz, John J., and Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 1996. Rethinking linguistic relativity . Papers presented at the Werner-Gren Symposium 112, held in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, in May 1991. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

A collection of papers arising from the “Rethinking Linguistic Relativity” Wenner-Gren Symposium in 1991 that brought about renewed interest in the topic.

Malt, Barbara C., and Phillip M. Wolff. 2010. Words and the mind: How words capture human experience . Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press.

Researchers across disciplines (linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists) contributed to this collection of papers documenting new advances in language-thought research in various domains (space, emotions, body parts, causation, etc.).

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November 30, 2018

Does Your Language Influence How You Think?

Would it be harder for people who speak a highly gendered language to create a more gender-neutral society?

By Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty & Neal Whitman

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Last November, I ran an episode on  the myth that the Inuit language has a surprisingly large number of words for “snow.”  I talked about how this myth is one example of a widely debunked idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, named after the linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf. This hypothesis claims that the language you speak determines the way you think, or at least influences it. This hypothesis is also sometimes called linguistic relativity. Here’s one of  the arguments against the idea of linguistic relativity  that I summarized in that episode.

[M]ultiple languages have just one word that covers both the color blue and the color green. Researchers sometimes call these “grue” languages, “grue” being a  portmanteau  of “green” and “blue,” but people who speak these grue languages can still distinguish between blue and green. They recognize that they’re different colors even though they are covered by one word, in the same way that we recognize that light blue and dark blue are different colors even though we’d sometimes call them both just “blue.” There are some subtle differences—people who speak languages that distinguish between green and blue find it easier to accurately pick a bluish-green color they’ve seen earlier out of a group of swatches because it’s easier to remember something you have a distinct name for—but it’s not that they are better at recognizing or conceiving the difference between blue and green (1).

However, I recently read  an article in “Smithsonian” magazine that seemed to challenge this view . It was about a court ruling in Germany saying it is unconstitutional for government institutions to assume that every person is either male or female. Any government form that people fill out now must have either a third gender to allow for people who identify as neither male nor female, or no gender question at all. The author of the article, Madhvi Ramani, argued that this ruling would be particularly troublesome for Germans, because German is a strongly gendered language (2). For example, you don’t just say you are a teacher. You are either a male teacher (der Lehrer) or a female teacher (die Lehrerin), and the author argued that this leads the German people to be especially partial to the idea of gender as a binary construct.

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So which is it? Can the language you speak influence your thoughts, or can’t it? The short answer is: Yes it can, but it’s not the kind of mind-blowing influence that people usually have in mind. 

What kind of mind-blowing influence are we talking about that isn’t actually real? For my money, the best example is the science fiction movie “Arrival” from 2016 .  I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t seen it, but I can say this much: The protagonist, a linguist named Louise Banks, learns the language of some alien visitors to Earth, and doing so changes the way her mind works so much...that it’s a major plot point. In fact, it’s the basis of the big reveal near the end of the movie. 

Linguistic Relativity and Color Names

Now, on to some aspects of language where people have done research to test the idea of linguistic relativity. Most of these examples come from “Language Files , ”a textbook published by the Ohio State University Department of Linguistics, and  a great TED talk by Lera Boroditsky  (3), a linguist at UC San Diego who is the leading expert on linguistic relativism.

First, let’s talk about color names a little more. A famous study in 1969 by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay did  not  find evidence for linguistic relativity when it came to color names. Instead, they found that languages tended to follow similar patterns in what colors they had names for, and  in the order in which they gained new color terms  (4). 

On the other hand, in favor of linguistic relativity are the facts about color terms that I mentioned earlier: People who speak languages that distinguish between green and blue find it easier than people who don’t to sort green and blue swatches into piles. There are similar results from the language Zuñi, which uses the same word for both yellow and orange (5).

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