Language is the currency of most human social processes. We use words to convey our emotions and thoughts, to tell stories, and to understand the world. It is somewhat odd, then, that so few investigations in the social sciences actually focus on natural language use among people in the real world. There are many legitimate reasons for not studying what people say or write. Historically, the analysis of text was slow, complex, and costly. The purpose of this chapter is to suggest that social scientists in general and social psychologists in particular should reconsider the value of language studies. With recent advances in computer text analysis methods, we are now able to explore basic social processes in new and rich ways that could not have been done even a decade ago. When language has been studied at all within social psychology, it has usually relied on fairly rigorous experimental methods using an assortment of standardized human coding procedures. These works are helping researchers to understand social attribution (Fiedler & Semin, 1992), intercultural communication (Hajek & Giles, 2003), and even how different cultures think about time (Boroditsky, 2001).

Abstract. This paper discusses the conceptualization of turn directions along traveled routes. Foremost, we are interested in the influence that language has on the conceptualization of turn directions. Two experiments are presented that contrast the way people group turns into similarity classes when they expect to verbally label the turns, as compared to when they do not. We are particularly interested in the role that major axes such as the perpendicular left and right axis play—are they boundaries of sectors or central prototypes, or do they have two functions: boundary and prototype? Our results support a) findings that linguistic and nonlinguistic categorization differ and b) that prototypes in linguistic tasks serve additionally as boundaries in nonlinguistic tasks, i.e. they fulfill a double function. We conclude by discussing implications for cognitive models of learning environmental layouts and for route-instruction systems in different modalities.

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concepts; categorization; space; number Possessing a language is one of the central features that distinguishes humans from other species. Many people share the intuition that they think “in ” language, hence that the absence of language would, ipso facto, be the absence of thought. One compelling version of this self-reflection is Helen Keller’s (1955) report that her recognition of the signed symbol for ‘water’ triggered thought processes which had theretofore-- and consequently-- been utterly absent. Statements to the same or related effect come from the most diverse intellectual sources: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world ” (Wittgenstein, 1922]; and “The fact of the matter is that the 'real world ' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group” (Sapir, 1941, as cited in Whorf, 1956, p. 75). * We thank Jerry Fodor for a discussion of the semantics of raining, Ray Jackendoff for a discussion of phonology, as well as Dan Slobin and Dedre Gentner for their comments on this chapter. Much of our perspective derives from our collaborative work with

CONTENTS Does language shape thought? Shapes and substances Space Objects Time Summary 0567.001 0567.002 Article descriptor: Languages differ dramatically from one another in terms of how they describe the world. Does having different ways of describing the world lead speakers of different languages also to have different ways of thinking about the world? DOES LANGUAGE SHAPE THOUGHT? Humans communicate with one another using an astonishing array of languages, and each language differs from the next in innumerable ways (from obvious differences in pronunciation and vocabulary to more subtle differences in grammar). For example, to say that 'the elephant ate the peanuts' in English, we must include tense - the fact that the event happened in the past. In Mandarin and Indonesian, indicating when the event occurred would be optional and couldn't be included in the verb. In Russian, the verb would need to include tense and also whether the peanut-eater was male or female (though only

In 4 experiments, the authors addressed the mechanisms by which grammatical gender (in Italian and German) may come to affect meaning. In Experiments 1 (similarity judgments) and 2 (semantic substitution errors), the authors found Italian gender effects for animals but not for artifacts; Experiment 3 revealed no comparable effects in German. These results suggest that gender effects arise as a generalization from an established association between gender of nouns and sex of human referents, extending to nouns referring to sexuated entities. Across languages, such effects are found when the language allows for easy mapping between gender of nouns and sex of human referents (Italian) but not when the mapping is less transparent (German). A final experiment provided further constraints: These effects during processing arise at a lexical–semantic level rather than at a conceptual level.

Does the language you speak shape the way you think about the world? Four studies investigate how English and Indonesian speakers encode and represent action events.

This paper is primarily intended to consider the role of grammatical gender on French pronouns in the process of their interpretation in utterance contexts. I will first discuss the theoretical context which underlies my general account of pronominal interpretation, the cognitive perspective of Relevance Theory, and sketch the bare bones of that account. I will then move on to a fuller discussion of grammatical gender on pronouns, its effect on interpretation and its representational status, using French as a test-bed, and taking psychological and psycholinguistic data into account. I conclude that in terms of their semantics, French pronouns carry primarily procedural meaning which has a fundamentally pragmatic effect on interpretation, but that gender is conceptual, and as such contributes in a rather different fashion both to the semantics of the pronoun, and to the process of its interpretation. 1. Concepts, Language and the Mind At some level it seems incontrovertible that linguistic interpretation is a cognitive process, and as such a theory which intends to explain and account for it must have some cognitive component at the very least. For Relevance Theory, the cognitive perspective is

This is "sentence 782" extracted from the book "The New C Standard: An Economic and Cultural Commentary"

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