Language and Thought Online: Cognitive Consequences of Linguistic Relativity

The voluminous literature on linguistic relativity has concerned itself primarily with the search for influences of particular languages on nonlinguistic cognition in situations in which language is not being used, overtly or covertly. This represents a long tradition in which anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists have sought to relate grammatical and semantic systems of a language to the worldview or epistemology or culture of the community of speakers of the language. For example, Lucy has proposed a set of requirements for studies of linguistic relativity. He stipulates that such research “should assess the cognitive performance of individual speakers aside from explicitly verbal contexts and try to establish that any cognitive patterns that are detected also characterize everyday behavior outside of the assessment situation ” (Lucy, 1996, p. 48, emphasis added). In this view, “cognition ” is seen as a collection of concepts and procedures that come into play regardless of whether an individual is engaged in verbal behavior—speaking, listening, or verbal thinking. Such research is directed towards what Lucy calls “an independent cognitive interpretation of reality ” (Lucy, 2000, p. xii). A rather different approach to “cognition ” is provided by investigators who concern themselves with language use and cultural practice. For example, Gumperz and Levinson, introducing Rethinking linguistic relativity (1996, p. 8), underline the importance of “theories of use in context, ” including formal semantic theories (e.g., Discourse Representation Theory, Situation Semantics) and pragmatic theories (Relevance Theory, Gricean theories), along with research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. In the present paper, I begin with the fact that human beings spend a large portion of their time in linguistic behavior of one sort or another—that is, we are creatures that are almost constantly involved in preparing, producing, and interpreting verbal messages. Accordingly, research on linguistic relativity is incomplete without attention to the cognitive processes that are brought to bear, online, in the course of using language.