6 - Approaches in comparative psycholinguistics: experimental studies on grammatical categories

Summary

This chapter reviews the balance of the work in psycholinguistics directly concerned with the linguistic relativity issue. Unlike the color research and related work on codability reviewed in the previous chapter, these studies are few in number and do not all cohere as a tradition; they consist of relatively isolated efforts at addressing Whorf's questions. Most of them are directly concerned with cross-linguistic comparison of grammatical differences, and all use experimental approaches to individual assessment. These studies are important because they bring the cognitive and methodological concerns of the psychologists together with the linguistic and comparative concerns of the anthropologists. They identify the sorts of category differences that can be meaningfully compared, they show how psychological hypotheses can be developed from such comparisons, and they illustrate some of the specific ways such hypotheses can be tested. Unfortunately, the experimental tasks often bear no clear relation to everyday behavior or to a general theory of cognition. Further, none of these studies employs a systematic linguistic approach: neither the structural nor the functional position of the categories within one language or across languages is adequately addressed. Without a precise linguistic characterization, the psychological hypotheses become meaningless and the experimental results uninterpretable.

Form classes and habitual classification

The first group of studies, all from the late 1950s, have a methodological focus. They attempt to devise experimental techniques capable of detecting whether grammatical categories have effects on individual cognition.