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Language and Thought >> Content Detail



Syllabus



Syllabus

Class Description

This course examines the many interrelationships between language & thought. Do people who speak different languages think differently? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages? Are some thoughts unthinkable without language? The course discussion will bring together ideas and findings from cognitive, developmental, and cultural psychology, as well as linguistics, anthropology, and ethology.

Requirements
  • Attend class.
  • Present papers based on readings.
Presentations
A priori arguments

Chapter 3 from Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct: How the mind creates language.  William Morrow & Co.: New York.

Slobin, D. I (1996).  From "thought and language" to "thinking for speaking." In Gumperz, JJ., & Levinson, SC. (Eds.,) Rethinking linguistic relativity. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language, No. 17. (pp. 70-96).

Hunt, E., & Agnoli, F. (1991). The Whorfian hypothesis: A cognitive psychology perspective. Psychological Review. Vol 98(3): 377-389.

Language as selector vs. constructor

1.  tight/loose

McDonough, L., Choi, S., & Mandler, J. (2003).  Understanding spatial relations: Flexible Infants, Lexical AdultsCognitive Psychology,46(3),229-59.

Hespos, S. J. & Spelke, E. S. (unpublished).  Conceptual precursors to language.

2.  directionality in reading

Yamada, R. A. & Tohkura, Y.  (1992).  The effects of experimental variables on the perception of American English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese listenersPerception & Psychophysics, 52, 376-392.

Strange, W. & Dittman, S.  (1984).  Effects of discrimination training on the perception of /r-l/ by Japanese adults learning EnglishPerception & Psychophysics, 36, 131-145.

3.  vowels

Kuhl, P. K.  (2000).  Language, mind & brain:  Experience alters perception.  In M. Gazzaniga (Ed.) The New Cognitive Neurosciences. MIT Press.

Color & Shape

Rosch, E.H. (1973) Natural categories. Cognitive Psychology, 4, 328-350.

Roberson, D., Davidoff, J., Shapiro, L. (in press).  Squaring the circle: The cultural relativity of ‘good’ shape.  To appear in Journal of Cognition and Culture.

Time

1. tense and temporal order

Guiora, A. (1983).  Language and concept formation: A cross-lingual analysis. Behavior Science Research. Vol 18(3): 228-256.

2. time as distance and quantity

Mori, I. (1976).  A cross-cultural study on children's conception of speed and duration: A comparison between Japanese and Thai children.  Japanese Psychological Research. Vol 18(3): 105-112.

Casasanto, D. & Boroditsky, L. (in preparation).  Time and language.

3. Writing direction

Tversky, B., Kugelmass, S., Winter, A. (1991).  Cross-cultural and developmental trends in graphic productions.  Cognitive-Psychology. Vol 23(4): 515-557

Morikawa, K, McBeath, M. (1992). Lateral motion bias associated with reading directionVision Research. Vol 32(6): 1137-1141.

Material Kind/Object Kind

Imai, M. and Mazuko, R.  (in press).  Re-evaluation of linguistic relativity:  Language-specific categories and the role of universal ontological knowledge in the construal of individuals.

Lucy, J. (1992)  Grammatical cagtegories and cognition:  A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.  (pages 72-84).

Colunga, E. and Smith, L.B. (2000). Learning to learn words:  A cross-linguistic study of the shape and material biases.  Poster presented at the BU Language Acquisition Conference.

Yoshida, H. and Smith, L. B.  (in press).  Shifting Ontological Boundaries:  How Japanese- and English Speaking Children Generalize Names for Animals and Artifacts.

Gender

Sera, M., Berge, C., & del Castillo, J. (1994)  Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by English and Spanish speakers.  Cognitive Development, 9, 3, 261-292.

Guiora, A. (1983).  Language and concept formation: A cross-lingual analysis. Behavior Science Research. Vol 18(3): 228-256.

Foundalis, H. (2002).  Evolution of gender in Indo-European languages.  Proceedings of the 24th Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Mulford, R. (1985). Comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender: Semantic versus formal factors. Journal-of-Child-Language, 12(2): 443-453.

Perez-Pereira, M. (1991). The acquisition of gender: What Spanish children tell us. Journal-of-Child-Language, 18(3): 571-590.

Space

Li, P. & Gleitman, L. R.  (2002).  Turning the tables: Language and spatial reasoningCognition, 83, 265-294.

Levinson, S. C., Kita, S., Haun, D. B. M., Rasch, B. H.  (2002). Returning the tables: Language affects spatial reasoningCognition, 84, 155-188.

Shusterman, A. & Spelke, E. unpublished paper on effects of spatial language training on children's navigation.

Events

1. manner/path

Gennari, S., Sloman, S., Malt, B., Fitch,W. (2002). Motion events in language and cognitionCognition. Vol 83(1): 49-79.

Papafragou, A., Massey, C., Gleitman, L. (2002). Shake, rattle, 'n' roll: The representation of motion in language and cognitionCognition. Vol 84(2): 189-219.

2. tense

Boroditsky, L., Ham, W. & Ramscar, M. (2002). What is universal about event perception? Comparing English and Indonesian speakers. Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

3. aspect

Boroditsky, L., & Trusova, Z. (in preparation). Cross-linguistic differences in verb aspect and their effects on thought: Encoding completion in English and Russian.

Number 1

Giaquinto (in press).  Mental number lines.  In Carruthers, P. (ed).  Culture and the Innate Mind.

Mix, K. S., Huttenlocher, J. and Levine, S. C. (1996)  Do preschool children recognize auditory-visual correspondences? Child Development, 67, 1592, 1608.

Hermalin, B and O’Conner, N. (1990).  Factors and primes:  as specific numerical ability.  Psychological Medicine, 20, 163-169.

Number 2

1.  fMRI studies of exact vs. approximate number representations

Dehaene, S., Spelke, E., Pinel, P., Stanescu, R., & Tsivkin, S. (1999). Sources of mathematical thinking: Behavioral and brain-imaging evidenceScience, 284, 970-974.

Stanescu-Cosson, R., Pinel, P., van de Moortele, P.-F., Le Bihan, D., Cohen, L., & Dehaene, S.  (2000).  Understanding dissociations in dyscalculia: A brain imaging study of the impact of number size on the cerebral networks for exact and approximate calculationBrain, 123, 2240-2255.

2.  the phonological length effect and arithmetic calculation

Lemer, C.  (2000).  Chapter from her thesis (in French!) or unpublished manuscript in English: TBA

Gathercole & Baddeley on calculation speed and arithmetic learning by children who speak different languages:  TBA.

3.  number words in different languages

Miller, K., Major, S.M., Shu, H., & Zhang, H.  (2000).  Ordinal knowledge: number names and number concepts in Chinese and EnglishCanadian Journal of Experimental Psychology, 54, 129-139.

Reasoning

1. counterfactuals

Lucy, J. (1992).  Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis.  Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England. (pages 208-256).

2. bilingualism and cognitive control

Bialystok, E. (1999).  Cognitive complexity and attentional control in the bilingual mind. Child Development. Vol 70(3): 636-644.

3. causality

Theory of mind

Lohman, H. and Tomasello, M.  (manuscript)  The role of language in the development of false belief understanding. 

de Villiers, J.G. & Pyers, J. (2002) Complements to Cognition: A longitudinal study  of the relationship between complex syntax and false-belief-understanding. Cognitive Development.

Siegal, M,. Varley, R., Want, S.C. (2001). Mind over grammar: reasoning in aphasia and development. Trends Cogn Sci, 296-301.

Bootstrapping and conceptual change

Smith, C. and Unger, C.  (1997)  What’s in dots-per-box?  Conceptual boot-strapping with stripped-down visual analogs.  Journal of the Learning Sciences, 6, 143-181.

Gentner, D., Brem, S., Ferguson, R. W., Markman, A. B., Levidow, B. B., Wolff, P., & Forbus, K. D. (1997). Analogical reasoning and conceptual change: A case study of Johannes Kepler. The Journal of the Learning Sciences, 6(1), 3-40.



 



 








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