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Featured Project:
Tenejapa, Mexico
Abstract
Language and cognition go together hand in hand. So we would not be
surprised to find (to use an old saw) that Eskimos talked a lot about snow
and had considerably better linguistic resources for doing so than, say,
residents of Haiti or Equador. But this close association of language and
thought leaves open which is cause and which is effect. Do Eskimos think
so well about snow because they have lots of snow words? Or do Eskimos
have lots of snow words because they must and do think so much about
snow? Recently, many anthropologists, linguists, and cognitive
psychologists have claimed that it is the language, very often, that leads
the thought. Other investigators are impressed with phenomena that seem to
suggest the opposed causal sequence, e.g., Americans who go for vacations
at Aspen and Vail quickly develop a variety of useful terms that describe
the state of the snow on the slopes. Recently, questions like this have
been put to experimental test at IRCS and elsewhere, using such examples
as spatial terms and spatial reasoning.
Languages do vary strikingly even in the way they describe rock-bottom
and fundamental perceptual and cognitive categories; in this case, we are
looking at language communities one of which habitually says "left" and
"right" where the other habitually says "east" and "west." to describe
locations and directions in space. We investigate English (a language that
is in this respect of the former kind) and Tzeltal and Tsotsil (languages
of the latter kind) under conditions where subjects are taught an array,
then rotated through space ,and then asked to reconstruct the original
array. This rotation method, used by animal psychologists (e.g., Restle,
1957), infancy psychologists (Acredolo, 1973) and comparative linguists
(Levinson, 2003), is designed to test whether the subjects have reasoned in
a way that centers on their own body position (which has changed under
rotation such that what was previously left is now right) or on a mental
map that refers to landmarks in the surrounding area ("near the Empire
State Building") or an abstract cardinality ("to the west").
Though their languages and even commonly uttered speech acts differ
systematically with respect to spatial terminology in the relevant regards,
and their environmental circumstances are very different (a rural
preliterate versus an urban literate community), still the Mayans and the
Americans that we studied think about and reason about space in much the
same ways.
Download the slides:
 Slide 2, PPT format
Slide 3, PPT format
Slide 4, PPT format
Spindle, PPT format
Pictures:
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
Photo 4
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