Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-24T20:57:56.175Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

WEIRD languages have misled us, too

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2010

Asifa Majid  and
Stephen C. Levinson
Asifa Majid
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6500AH, The Netherlands. [email protected]://www.mpi.nl/people/[email protected]://www.mpi.nl/people/levinson-stephen
Stephen C. Levinson
Affiliation:
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen 6500AH, The Netherlands. [email protected]://www.mpi.nl/people/[email protected]://www.mpi.nl/people/levinson-stephen
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The linguistic and cognitive sciences have severely underestimated the degree of linguistic diversity in the world. Part of the reason for this is that we have projected assumptions based on English and familiar languages onto the rest. We focus on some distortions this has introduced, especially in the study of semantics.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 33 , Issue 2-3 , June 2010 , pp. 103
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Baillargeon, R. (1994) How do infants learn about the physical world? Current Directions in Psychological Science 3:133–40.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Berlin, B. & Kay, P. (1969) Basic color terms: Their universality and evolution. University of California Press.Google Scholar
Bowerman, M. (1996) Learning how to structure space for language: A cross-linguistic perspective. In: Language and space, ed. Bloom, P., Peterson, M. A., Nadel, L. & Garrett, M. F., pp. 385–436. MIT Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bowerman, M. & Choi, S. (2001) Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language-specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories. In: Language acquisition and conceptual development, ed. Bowerman, M. & Levinson, S. C., pp. 475–511. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Burenhult, N. (2006) Body part terms in Jahai. Language Sciences 28:162–80.Google Scholar
Clark, H. H. (1973) Space, time, semantics, and the child. In: Cognitive development and the acquisition of language, ed. Moore, T., pp. 27–63. Academic Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Corbett, G. G. & Davies, I. R. L. (1995) Linguistic and behavioural measures for ranking basic colour terms. Studies in Language 19:301–57.Google Scholar
Davidoff, J., Davies, I. & Roberson, D. (1999) Colour categories in a stone-age tribe. Nature 398:203–04.Google Scholar
Dryer, M. S. (2008) Polar questions. In: The world atlas of language structures online, ed. Haspelmath, M., Dryer, M. S., Gil, D. & Comrie, B.. Max Planck Digital Library, Ch. 116. Available at: http://wals.info/feature/116. Accessed 17 December 2009.Google Scholar
Evans, N. & Levinson, S. C. (2009) The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 32:429–48.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Gilbert, A. L., Regier, T., Kay, P. & Ivry, R. B. (2006) Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 103:489–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Haun, D. B. M. & Rapold, C. J. (2009) Variation in memory for body movements across cultures. Current Biology 19:R1068–69.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hespos, S. J. & Spelke, E. S. (2002) Conceptual precursors to language. Nature 430:453–56.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hoffman, D. D. & Richards, W. A. (1984) Parts of recognition. Cognition 18:65–96.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kay, P. & Maffi, L. (2008) Number of basic color categories. In: The world atlas of language structures online, ed. Haspelmath, M., Dryer, M. S., Gil, D. & Comrie, B., Ch. 133. Max Planck Digital Library. [Available at: http://wals.info/feature/133. Accessed December 17, 2009.]Google Scholar
Li, P. & Gleitman, L. (2002) Turning the tables: Language and spatial reasoning. Cognition 83:265–94.Google Scholar
Majid, A. (2010) Words for parts of the body. In Words and the mind: How words capture human experience, ed. Malt, B. C. & Wolff, P., pp. 58–71. Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
McDonough, L., Choi, S. & Mandler, J. M. (2003) Understanding spatial relations: Flexible infants, lexical adults. Cognitive Psychology 46:229–59.Google Scholar
Özgen, E. & Davies, I. R. L. (1998) Turkish color terms: Tests of Berlin and Kay's theory of color universals and linguistic relativity. Linguistics 36:919–56.Google Scholar
Roberson, D., Pak, H. S. & Hanley, J. R. (2008) Categorical perception of colour in the left and right hemisphere is verbally mediated: Evidence from Korean. Cognition 107:752–62.Google Scholar
Slobin, D. I. (1973) Cognitive prerequisites for the development of grammar. In: Studies of child language development, ed. Ferguson, C. A. & Slobin, D. I., pp. 175–208. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Terrill, A. (2006) Body part terms in Lavukaleve, a Papuan language of the Solomon Islands. Language Sciences 28:304–22.Google Scholar
Thierry, G., Athanasopoulos, P., Wiggett, A., Dering, B. & Kuipers, J.-R. (2009) Unconscious effects of language-specific terminology on preattentive color perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 106:4567–70.Google Scholar
Uchikawa, K. & Boynton, R. M. (1987) Categorical color perception of Japanese observers: Comparison with that of Americans. Vision Research 27:1825–33.Google Scholar