How Do Language-Specific Concepts Relate to Cognition?

Abstract

This chapter addresses the following question: How do language-specific concepts relate to cognition? The interaction between language and thought has fascinated scholars and laypeople alike for centuries, but during the past few decades this complex topic has gained significance from the discovery that, as shown in Part II, the amount of cross-linguistic diversity in both lexical and grammatical semantics is much greater than previously assumed. The first two sections draw upon psychological and neuroscientific studies to support two seemingly contradictory but actually complementary claims: many forms of cognition do not depend on language-specific concepts; nonetheless, such concepts do sometimes influence a variety of cognitive processes, in keeping with Whorf’s (1956) linguistic relativity hypothesis (or at least with a weak version of it). The last section then addresses some interpretive issues regarding recent neuroscientific evidence that some verbal and nonverbal semantic tasks have partly shared cortical underpinnings.