Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought

Dedre Gentner, Susan Goldin-Meadow

MIT Press, 2003 - Language Arts & Disciplines - 528 pages

The idea that the language we speak influences the way we think has evoked perennial fascination and intense controversy. According to the strong version of this hypothesis, called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis after the American linguists who propounded it, languages vary in their semantic partitioning of the world, and the structure of one's language influences how one understands the world. Thus speakers of different languages perceive the world differently.Although the last two decades have been marked by extreme skepticism concerning the possible effects of language on thought, recent theoretical and methodological advances in cognitive science have given the question new life. Research in linguistics and linguistic anthropology has revealed striking differences in cross-linguistic semantic patterns, and cognitive psychology has developed subtle techniques for studying how people represent and remember experience. It is now possible to test predictions about how a given language influences the thinking of its speakers.Language in Mind includes contributions from both skeptics and believers and from a range of fields. It contains work in cognitive psychology, cognitive development, linguistics, anthropology, and animal cognition. The topics discussed include space, number, motion, gender, theory of mind, thematic roles, and the ontological distinction between objects and substances. The contributors include Melissa Bowerman, Eve Clark, Jill de Villiers, Peter de Villiers, Giyoo Hatano, Stan Kuczaj, Barbara Landau, Stephen Levinson, John Lucy, Barbara Malt, Dan Slobin, Steven Sloman, Elizabeth Spelke, and Michael Tomasello.

Contents

• Languages and Representations: 17
• The Key Is Social Cognition: 47
• Contributors: 57
• Sex Syntax and Semantics: 61
• Speaking versus Thinking about Objects and Actions: 81
• Setting: 113
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology Giyoo Hatano: 153
• Cognitive Consequences: 157
• Psycholinguistics University of the: 186
• Why Were So Smart: 195
• Does Language Help Animals Think?: 237
• What Makes Us Smart? Core Knowledge and Natural: 277
• How: 313
• Coming to Understand False Beliefs: 335
• Does the Language We Acquire: 385
• LanguageSpecific Categories: 429
• Interaction of Language Type and Referent Type in: 465
• Northwestern University: 488
• Do We Think Ergative?: 493
• Index: 523

Popular passages

Page 4 - 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.‎

Page 177 - I therefore must have heard, as a child, the account of this story, which my parents believed, and projected it into the past in the form of a visual memory, which was a memory of a memory, but false.‎

Page 242 - The mental powers in some early progenitor of man must have been more highly developed than in any existing ape, before even the most imperfect form of speech could have come into use...‎

Page 17 - linguistic relativity principle," which means, in informal terms, that 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.‎

About the author

Susan Goldin-Meadow is Professor of Psychology and an affiliate of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought; Bradford Books
• Editors: Dedre Gentner, Susan Goldin-Meadow
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: MIT Press, 2003
• ISBN: 0262571633, 9780262571630
• Length: 528 pages
• Subjects: Language Arts & Disciplines / Linguistics / General; Psychology / Cognitive Psychology; Psychology / Cognitive Psychology & Cognition