Psychology Assignment 2
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CHAPTER 27
Language, Cognition, and Culture Beyond the Whorfian Hypothesis
CHI-YUE CHIU ANGELA K-Y. LEUNG
LETTY KWAN
The idea that every distinctive language would give rise to a distinctive culture stayed at the center of American anthropology throughout much of the 20th century. According to Benjamin Whorf (1956), who had written most enthusiastically on the linguistic shaping of thoughts and culture, “Users of markedly dif- ferent languages are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world” (p. 252). In other words, the grammar of a language constrains the way its speakers perceive the world and mentally represent what they perceive. As a result, there is an isomor- phic relation between the structure of a lan- guage and the mental processes of the people who speak it. This idea is often referred to as linguistic relativity.
Whorf also held that in the coevolution of language and culture, “the nature of the lan- guage is the factor that limits free plasticity and rigidifies channels of development [of culture] in the more autocratic way” (Whorf, 1956, p. 156). Thus, the grammar of a language is
taken to be the cause of the speakers’ cognitions. This assumption is often referred to as linguistic determinism (Chiu, Krauss, & Lee, 1999).
The original form of linguistic determinism consists of six propositions:
1. There is no inherent structure in people’s experiences; perceptual order emerges when people organize their experiences with men- tal categories.
2. Language is a major cognitive tool people use to categorize their experiences.
3. As a language evolves, it develops a coher- ent internal logic.
4. The internal logic of a language embodies a metaphysics or naive conception of the real- ity; as such, the internal logic of a language stands in isomorphic relation to that of its associated culture.
5. Markedly different languages evoke in the mind of its speakers different mental repre- sentations of similar linguistic referents.
6. Language constrains the development of nonlinguistic cultural norms.
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Taken together, these propositions imply that the structural properties of a language have general effects on cognition that extend beyond the immediate context of language use.
Whorf’s writings have inspired a search for the linguistic foundation of human sociality in social psychology. However, the original form of linguistic determinism, inspiring as it is, lacks the empirical support needed to sustain the early enthusiasm for it (Brown, 1976; Glucksberg, 1988). The demise of the Whorfian hypothesis has led to a decline in in- terest in the linguistic foundation of culture in social psychology, and to an overriding concern with language universals in linguistics. As Chomsky (1992) puts it, “The computational system of language that determines the forms and relations of linguistic expressions may in- deed be invariant; in this sense, there is only one human language, as a rational Martian ob- serving humans would have assumed” (p. 50).
Language is a polysemous word, with both a generic sense (as in “Language pervades our so- cial life”) and a specific sense (as in “English is a language spoken by most Americans”). These two senses are related but not synonymous. Whorf (1956) clearly intended the specific sense of language, and the empirical support for Whorf’s formulation of linguistic determin- ism is tenuous (Glucksberg, 1988). Despite this, there is considerable evidence that lan- guage (in its generic sense) can, under some cir- cumstances, affect the way we think, remem- ber, and perceive. Advances in the cognitive and linguistic sciences have provided much new knowledge about the mechanisms of cog- nition and their relations to various aspects of language. These developments lead to alterna- tive views of how language may be implicated in cognitive processes such as memory, catego- rization, thinking, and problem solving (e.g., see Hoosain, 1991; Hunt & Agnoli, 1991). They also suggest some of the conditions and mechanisms for such cognitive effects of lan- guage (Hunt & Banaji, 1988).
In this chapter, instead of questioning whether we should accept or reject the Whorfian hypothesis, we focus on how lan- guage may be implicated in human cognitions. We posit that the availability of certain struc- tural properties in a language is important but not sufficient for it to affect cognitions. In- stead, we suggest that the vocabulary of a lan- guage provides its speakers with some lin- guistic tools for encoding experiences and
expressing thoughts, and that these tools may influence cognitions only when they are used. Furthermore, when used in a communication context, because of the interactive nature of communication, aside from being a tool for ex- pressing thoughts and ideas, language is also a tool for negotiating shared meanings in the context.
As an illustration of these arguments, con- sider a hypothetical scenario in which a person with no knowledge of Chinese characters is asked to describe Figure 27.1a. The description is likely to be rather lengthy, with plenty of de- tails of the figure’s components (e.g., the flat- tened oval on the top, the cross below it, the curved arms that extend to both sides, and the tail pointing to the left). In contrast, a person who has good command of the Chinese lan- guage may refer to this figure simply as “the ancient form of the character zi” (child; see Fig- ure 27.1b for the modern form the character). This example illustrates how the availability of a linguistic code (zi) in a language (Chinese) for encoding a stimulus affords an economical re- ferring expression of the stimulus.
When language is used to characterize a state of affairs, a linguistic representation of that state of affairs is created or evoked. For exam- ple, an English speaker may use the color term blue to describe a greenish-blue chromatic light that has the wavelength of 490 µm. As a result, the light is linguistically represented as “a blue light.” Linguistic representations may then compete with and overshadow the perceptual representations of that state of affairs. In the previous example, the linguistic representation (blue light) may compete with and overshadow the original visual representation of the light (a greenish-blue light of 490 µm). Consequently, the speaker may visualize and remember the
27. Language, Cognition, and Culture 669
FIGURE 27.1. Ancient (a) and modern (b) forms of the Chinese character zi (child).
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light as being bluer than it is (Thomas & DeCapito, 1966).
Members of a speech community share not only the formal rules of a language but also the ground rules and assumptions that underlie language usage. According to Grice (1975), communication is a collaborative activity. In a conversation, the speakers are expected to make their contribution “as informative as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk ex- change” (p. 45). The speaker is expected to be aware of these rules and adhere to them. Back to the example of describing the old form of the Chinese character zi, when the Chinese speaker describes it to someone who knows nothing about Chinese characters, it is unlikely that she would refer to it simply as “the old form of the Chinese character zi,” because she expects her addressee not to possess the knowledge neces- sary to identify the referent from this expres- sion. Instead, she may say something like “This is the old form of the Chinese character zi; it has a flattened oval on the top and a cross be- low it” (Lau, Chiu, & Hong, 2001).
A grounding process is implicated in inter- personal communication. At the beginning of the conversation, the speaker’s utterance repre- sents his or her hypothesis about what the ad- dressee will understand, and the addressee has a hypothesis about what the speaker means by the utterance (Clark & Brennan, 1991). Fur- thermore, as the conversation proceeds, the participants use each other’s response as evi- dence to test and revise their hypotheses. They acquire common ground and eventually estab- lish consensus on the referential meanings of the stimulus. An indication of this grounding process is that the referring expression would become much shorter and more efficient after the speaker has described the same referent to the same speaker several times (Krauss & Glucksberg, 1977). In this example, the refer- ring expression of Figure 27.1a becomes shorter (“the old form of zi”) after the Chinese speaker has described it to the same addressee several times. Eventually, both participants agree to refer to it as “the old form of zi.” In short, language is not merely a tool for express- ing thoughts and ideas; it is also a tool for ne- gotiating meanings: Through the use of lan- guage in communication, private cognitions are rendered public and directed toward a shared representation of the referent (Schegloff, 1991).
In summary, like Whorf, we hold that lan- guage has important influences on human cognitions. However, unlike Whorf, we submit that the structural properties of a language do not rigidly determine thoughts. Instead, gram- mar and vocabulary limit the tools that are available to speakers of the language for con- structing and negotiating meanings. The emer- gent properties of the communication context constrain the likelihood and the manner that certain expressions or ways of expressions in a language will be evoked and applied in the con- text. These processes may in turn direct the de- velopment of shared cognitions in the speech community. In the sections that follow, we re- view the evidence for these ideas.
LANGUAGE AND MIND: THE EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE
To recap, we posit that (1) the availability of certain structural properties in a language is important but not enough for language to im- pact cognitions; (2) the characteristic ways of referring to a state of affairs in a language are linguistic tools speakers of the language can use to encode experiences and express thoughts; (3) these tools influence cognitions only when they are used; (4) when language is used to characterize a state of affairs, a linguistic repre- sentation of that state of affairs is created or evoked, which may compete with and over- shadow the perceptual representation of that state of affairs; and (5) individuals who partici- pate in communication acquire common ground and eventually establish consensus on the referential meanings of the stimulus through communication. In this section, we re- view the empirical evidence for these five prop- ositions.
Grammar and Thought
The original form of the Whorfian hypothesis focuses on the relationship between a lan- guage’s grammar and the language users’ cognitions. According to Whorf (1956), “It is not words mumbled, but rapport between words, which enables them to work together at all to any semantic result” (p. 67; emphasis in original). “Words and speech are not the same thing. . . . The patterns of sentence structure that guide words are more important than the words” (p. 253). In his view, an integrated “fashion of speaking” shapes the linguistic as-
670 V. COGNITION
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pects of thoughts. Whorf used the term cryptotype to refer to “a submerged, subtle, and elusive meaning, corresponding to no ac- tual word, yet shown by linguistic analysis to be functionally important in the grammar” (p. 70). An example of cryptotype is the inani- mate object class in Navaho (a Native Ameri- can language). Navaho classifies inanimate ob- jects into “round objects” and “long objects,” and a different verb stem is required for a “round” or a “long” subject (or object) in a sentence. Whorf believed that an analysis of cryptotypes is needed to reveal the linguistic as- pects of thinking.
Research inspired by Whorf’s ideas has pro- vided some support for the idea that the gram- mar of a language encodes a cultural world- view (the linguistic relativity hypothesis). However, the idea that the cognitive effects of a language’s grammar extend beyond the imme- diate context of language use (the linguistic de- terminism hypothesis) has received little sup- port.
Grammar Encodes a Cultural Worldview
Whorf and his followers assumed that the grammatical structure of every language em- bodies a cultural worldview. There is some evi- dence for this assumption. For example, the system of pronouns in a language reflects the conceptions of the social self in the culture. The use of a pronoun sustains attention on its refer- ent, bringing the person out from the conversa- tional background. In some languages (e.g., English), the use of a pronoun is grammatically obligatory. In other languages (e.g., Spanish), the subject pronoun can be dropped, because the referent can be recovered from the verb in- flections. In some languages (e.g., Chinese), the subject pronoun can be dropped even though there is no verb inflection, or the subject–verb agreement rule. The grammatical obligatory use of the first-person pronoun maximally dis- tinguishes the speaker’s self. Similarly, obliga- tory use of the second-person pronoun maxi- mally distinguishes the addressee(s). The omission of either or both of the two classes of pronouns deemphasizes the salience of their corresponding referent(s).
Consistent with the idea that language en- codes cultural conceptions of the self, groups whose language allows pronoun drop tend to stress the importance of being interdependent with the social world, maintaining good rela-
tionship and fitting in, whereas groups whose language disallows pronoun drop tend to stress the desirability of being independent from peo- ple around them and expression of the inner set of attributes and abilities (E. Kashima & Kashima, 1998; Y. Kashima & Kashima, 2003).
How individuals process verbal and coverbal information may also reflect their cultural worldview. Listeners tend to extract different information from an utterance’s verbal con- tents and coverbal cues (e.g., vocal tone, ges- ture, gaze pattern); they extract the utterance’s intended meanings from its verbal contents, and infer contextual information (e.g., the speaker’s status, personality characteristics, and emotional states) from coverbal cues (Krauss & Chiu, 1988). Consistent with the view that American societies are low-context societies, in which people tend to have many connections but of shorter duration, or for some specific reason, knowledge is codified, public, external, and accessible, and cultural beliefs and expectations are spelled out explic- itly, and Japanese societies are high-context societies, in which people have long-term rela- tionships, knowledge is situational and rela- tional, and verbally explicit communications are infrequent (see Hall, 1990), European Americans respond automatically to the verbal contents of a message, and Japanese respond automatically to the vocal tone (Ishii, Reyes, & Kitayama, 2003). In short, a language’s gram- mar and the way language is processed may re- flect the implicit organization of knowledge in the language community.
Linguistic Determinism: A Strong Claim in Search of Evidence
In the original formulation of the Whorfian hy- pothesis, the structural aspects of a language are assumed to shape the way its speakers ha- bitually represent the reality. For example, time is a continuum. However, in standard average European (SAE) languages, no formal markers distinguish real plurals (e.g., seven dogs) from imaginary plurals (e.g., seven days). According to Whorf, because of this linguistic property, speakers of SAE languages may habitually as- sume that time can be dissected into discrete units (e.g., days, weeks). Whorf also believed that the three-tense (past, present, and future) system in SAE verbs predisposes speakers of SAE languages to the perception of time as a
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straight line extending from the past to the present, and the future. In short, in Whorf’s view, speakers of languages with markedly dif- ferent grammars are linguistically predisposed to different perceptions and representations of otherwise identical experience (e.g., time).
As noted, there is consistent evidence that the grammar of a language may embody a cer- tain cultural worldview. However, support for the idea that the cognitive effects of a lan- guage’s grammar extend beyond the immediate context of language use is tenuous. Research that directly tested the linguistic determinism hypothesis has examined the cognitive effects of grammatical markers of shapes, counter- factual ideas and entification, gender, and false beliefs. As described below, no conclusive evi- dence for linguistic determinism was found in this research.
GRAMMATICAL MARKERS OF SHAPES
In an early study, Carroll and Casagrande (1958) presented to Navaho-speaking children, English-speaking Navaho children, and white middle class children in Boston two objects that differed in color and shape. Next, they showed a third object similar to the first two objects either in color or in shape, and had the participants indicate which of the first two ob- jects went best with the third one. The results are equivocal. Consistent with the linguistic de- terminism hypothesis, when compared to the English-speaking Navaho children, Navaho- speaking children were more inclined to group objects with a similar shape together. However, contrary to the linguistic determinism hypothe- sis, when compared to the English-speaking Boston children, Navaho-speaking children made fewer shape-based choices.
COUNTERFACTUAL REASONING AND ENTIFICATION
Unlike English, Chinese lacks formal grammat- ical markers for counterfactuals. Also, unlike English, Chinese does not have a formal way to express a condition or event as an entity (entification). Bloom (1981a) posits that these two grammatical features hinder Chinese speakers’ development of conceptual schemas for abstract, theoretical thinking. He further argues that the Chinese way of speaking shapes Chinese speakers’ moral outlook, orienting them toward pragmatic moral beliefs, and
away from a formalized theoretical approach to morality (Bloom, 1981b).
Findings from several studies seemed to sup- port Bloom’s views. In one study, Chinese speakers and English speakers read a passage that contained counterfactual statements in their respective native languages. Later in the study, their comprehension of the passage was tested. English speakers did much better than Chinese speakers on the test. Moreover, Chinese–English bilinguals performed much better on the English version of the test than on the Chinese translation of it (Bloom, 1981a). Bloom believes that the lack of formal markers for counterfactuals in the Chinese language hinders its speakers’ counterfactual reasoning ability.
However, Bloom’s findings are difficult to in- terpret, because the English passages in his studies were written in idiomatic English, but the Chinese passages were not written in idi- omatic Chinese (Au, 1983, 1984, 2004). Thus, the two versions of the passages are not equally comprehensible. Indeed, when the Chinese ver- sion was rewritten in idiomatic Chinese, Chi- nese and English speakers performed equally well on the comprehension test. Moreover, when English speakers were presented with English passages written in nonidiomatic Eng- lish, they made a considerable amount of com- prehension errors (Au, 1983). Furthermore, Chinese grade-school children who have al- most no knowledge of English subjunctive un- derstand counterfactual statements (Au, 1983; Liu, 1985). Finally, among Chinese-speaking children with little exposure to the English lan- guage, the ability to understand counterfactual statements increases with age. By age 11, al- most all Chinese children who know little Eng- lish can solve counterfactual problems (Liu, 1985). In short, it seems that counterfactual reasoning ability increases with cognitive ma- turity and is not related to the language one speaks.
Does the lack of formal entification markers in the Chinese language hinder its speakers’ formal reasoning ability? To answer this ques- tion, Bloom (1981a) developed another com- prehension test. The test passage contained fac- tual information about the relationships of different events. To answer the comprehension question correctly, these events need to be transformed into entities and placed into a the- oretical framework. As Bloom expected, Chi-
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nese speakers performed more poorly on this test than did English speakers.
However, to Bloom’s embarrassment, Takano (1989) pointed out that the designated correct answer in Bloom’s comprehension test was actually an incorrect answer. Moreover, among the undergraduates who had taken Bloom’s test, those with more formal training in scientific reasoning were less likely to choose the designated correct answer. Furthermore, those who challenged the validity of Bloom’s comprehension question were able to provide better explanations of the functional relation- ships among the variables described in the pas- sage than those who chose the “correct” an- swer.
GRAMMATICAL GENDER
Grammatical gender research provides another opportunity to test the effects of grammar on cognitive representations. Languages differ in whether they assign a gender to all nouns that refer to animates (e.g., psychologist) or to nouns that refer to inanimates (e.g., moon). Some languages (e.g., Spanish, Italian, French, German, Arabic, and Hebrew) mark gender with morphological information carried by pronouns, determiners, nouns, and adjectives, and others (e.g., English) do not. It is often as- sumed that, at least in most European lan- guages, the basis of grammatical gender assign- ments to inanimate objects is arbitrary. For example, in French, the word for “the moon” is feminine (la lune) and the word for “the sun” is masculine (le soleil). However, in German, “the moon” is masculine (der Mond) and “the sun” is feminine (die Sonne).
Some studies suggest that users of a language with a grammatical gender system tend to infer psychological gender properties from gender inflections of nouns. For example, French speakers conceptualize the moon in more psy- chologically feminine ways and the sun in more psychologically masculine ways than do Ger- man speakers. In a classic study, Ervin (1962) taught native speakers of Italian nonsense words that possessed either the masculine Ital- ian affix (-o) or the feminine one (-a). In this study, the participants rated the nonsense words with masculine endings as more like men than those with feminine endings, and vice versa. Similar results have been ob- tained in speakers of Arabic (Clarke, Losoff,
McCracken, & Rood, 1984; Clarke, Losoff, McCracken, & Still, 1981). However, because participants in these studies were asked to judge the gender connotations of words, it is unclear whether these judgments reveal partici- pants’ knowledge of grammatical gender or the effects of grammatical gender on categoriza- tion (see Sera et al., 2002). Nonetheless, other studies have used more sophisticated tests of categorization to assess the effects of grammat- ical gender. For example, participants were shown pictures (vs. words) of objects and asked to assign either a man’s voice or a woman’s voice to the objects. Using these meth- ods, researchers have obtained robust effects of grammatical gender on object categorization in Spanish (Martinez & Shatz, 1996; Sera, Berge, & del Castillio Pintado, 1994; Sera et al., 2002) and French speakers (Sera et al., 2002). These findings seem to support the linguistic determinism hypothesis.
However, two problems undermine the va- lidity of this conclusion. First, the effects of grammatical gender on object categorization are not uniform across languages with a gram- matical gender system. For example, the cogni- tive effects of grammatical gender are absent in Finnish speakers (Clarke et al., 1981, 1984) and German speakers (Sera et al., 2002). Sec- ond, although assignments of gender to objects are mostly arbitrary in some languages (e.g., German), this is not the case in other languages (e.g., Spanish). For example, in Spanish, a fe- male gender is often attributed to an object that is used by women, natural, round, or light. Likewise, a male gender is often attributed to an object that is used by men, artificial, angu- lar, or heavy. Moreover, native speakers of Eng- lish (a language without a grammatical gender system) tend to assign male or female voices to pictured objects corresponding to Spanish gen- der. Thus, Spanish grammatical gender seems to be highly correlated with natural gender. In a series of computer and experimental simula- tion studies, Sera et al. (2002) found that gen- eralization of masculine and feminine traits to inanimate objects is likely to occur when the grammatical gender system has only two gen- der categories, and when there is a high corre- lation between grammatical and natural gen- der. The result of this simulation study is consistent with the empirical observation that grammatical gender effect is found among Spanish speakers but not among German
27. Language, Cognition, and Culture 673
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speakers. In short, the weight of the evidence to date is in favor of the conclusion that object categorization by gender may stem from the natural gender associations of objects. Natural and grammatical gender may or may not corre- spond. Grammatical gender effects are likely to be found only when they do.
FALSE BELIEFS
Puerto Rican (PR) Spanish and Turkish have formal verb forms for marking false belief states explicitly. For example, PR Spanish uses creer to denote that the speaker is neutral on whether the grammatical subject in the sen- tence holds a true belief or not, and adds a re- flexive clitic to the verb phrase (creer-se) to de- note that the speaker is sure that the grammatical subject holds a false belief. Eng- lish and Brazilian (BR) Portuguese have no such specific forms. Shatz, Diesendruck, Martinez-Beck, and Akar (2003) compared the performance on a false belief understanding task of PR Spanish-speaking preschoolers and Turkish-speaking preschoolers with their English-speaking and BR Portuguese-speaking counterparts. In this study, Experimenter 1 showed the preschooler in the presence of Ex- perimenter 2 a crayon box and a blue box. Then, after Experimenter 2 left the room to get some paper, Experimenter 1 opened both boxes, remarked that the crayon box was empty and the blue box contained crayons, and asked the preschooler, “Where does [Experi- menter 2] think the crayons are?” and “Where is [Experimenter 2] going to look for the cray- ons when [he or she] returns to draw?” In the two languages with formal markers for false beliefs, the verb think in the first question pro- vided an explicit linguistic cue of the false belief state. The critical question is: Does the pres- ence of formal markers for false belief states in a language facilitate understanding of these states (e.g., Experimenter 2 would expect to find the crayons in the crayon box)? Further- more, is it necessary for the explicit marker to be present in the immediate language use con- text for it to improve understanding of false be- lief states? According to the original version of the Whorfian hypothesis, the grammar of a language predisposes its users to a certain pat- tern of cognition irrespective of whether the grammatical feature is present in the immediate communication context.
If having formal grammatical markers for false beliefs in one’s own language improves understanding of false belief states, Turkish and PR Spanish speakers and Turkish speakers should do better than BR Portuguese speakers and English speakers on the comprehension task. In addition, if false belief markers help by improving children’s general ability to under- stand false belief states, irrespective of the lan- guage used in any particular case, Turkish and PR Spanish speakers should do better than BR Portuguese speakers and English speakers on the general question about false beliefs (“Where is [Experimenter 2] going to look for the crayons?”), as well as the explicitly marked question (“Where does [Experimenter 2] think the crayons are?”). However, if the grammati- cal markers for false belief states help only lo- cally, without influencing reasoning in a more general way, the Turkish and PR Spanish speakers should outperform the BR Portuguese speakers and English speakers only when the explicitly marked question was asked. In this study, only a local effect of explicit grammati- cal markers was found.
The results indicate that the presence of a formal grammatical marker of false belief states in one’s language facilitates false belief understanding. Specifically, only 37% of the BR Portuguese- or English-speaking children (children who spoke unmarked languages) an- swered most of the false belief comprehension questions correctly. In contrast, 71% of the Turkish- and PR Spanish-speaking children (children who spoke marked languages) an- swered most of the false belief questions cor- rectly when they responded to the marked (think) questions.
The results also show that marking for false belief in a language has a local rather than a general effect. When the Turkish- and PR Spanish-speaking children heard the unmarked (look) questions, only 32% answered most of the false belief questions correctly.
CONCLUSION
Consistent with the linguistic relativity hypoth- esis, there is evidence that some grammatical properties of a language embody a distinctive cultural worldview. However, the strong claim that the grammar of a language shapes its speakers’ thought processes lacks empirical support. The lack of clear support for the lin-
674 V. COGNITION
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guistic determinism hypothesis highlights the need to explore alternative ways of conceptual- izing the relationship of language, cognition, and culture.
Effects of Linguistic Encoding
The linguistic determinism hypothesis is not the only way to formulate the relation of lan- guage and thought. Whorf’s primary concern was how structural differences among lan- guages (independent of cultural experiences) predispose users of different languages to highly patterned, systematic, and distinctive thought processes. It is conceivable that the Whorfian hypothesis (1956) is incorrect, and that language (in its generic sense) importantly affects cognition. Indeed, there is considerable evidence that language use influences (1) prob- lem solving (how an object is labeled can affect the way it is used in a problem-solving task; e.g., Ranken, 1963), (2) decision making (the verbal framing of a formally identical decision problem can result in different decisions; e.g., Kahneman & Tversky, 1984), and (3) memory performance (describing a human face may dis- tort accuracy in a delayed recognition test; e.g., Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990).
What is distinctive and interesting about the studies that show clear effects of language on some cognitive process is that, in one way or another, they all involve effects resulting from the use of language to represent a state of af- fairs. This critical commonality leads to an al- ternative formulation of the relation of lan- guage and cognition: Languages with different structural properties afford different tools for characterizing a state of affairs. A language has important cognitive consequences only when its structural features or referring expressions are applied in the immediate language use con- text (Chiu et al., 1999; Krauss & Chiu, 1998). The result of the false beliefs study reviewed earlier is consistent with this formulation: Among Turkish- and PR Spanish-speaking chil- dren, comprehension of false belief states im- proved only when the comprehension question included an explicit linguistic marker of false belief states.
Recoding interference may explain the ef- fects of linguistic encoding on how a state of af- fairs is perceived, experienced, and remem- bered. Schooler and Engstler-Schooler (1990) proposed a recoding interference hypothesis to
account for the memory effects of linguistic en- coding. According to this hypothesis, the same state of affairs can be encoded in both verbal and visual representational formats. For exam- ple, an eyewitness in a crime scene may visual- ize the face of a suspect or describe it.
The use of a particular referring expression may evoke an online linguistic representation of the referent that colors the immediate per- ception of the referent. When it is difficult to verbalize a state of affairs, representations in the verbal and visual formats may contain dif- ferent information. In the previous example, the verbal description of the face and the visual image of it may contain different information. Under such circumstances, competition may occur between the two forms of representa- tions, and subsequent memory representation of the referent may be assimilated into its lin- guistic representation (Chiu, Krauss, & Lau, 1998).
In a series of experiments that tested this hy- pothesis, Schooler and his associates (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990; Fallshore & School- er, 1995) had participants either describe or sim- ply visualize a face they had seen. Participants who described the face were less able to recog- nize the face in a delayed recognition test com- pared to those who had seen the face and visual- ized it. Featural information about faces is easier to verbalize than configural information (Fallshore & Schooler, 1995). Thus, it is possible that describing a face evoked relatively feature- based representations, whereas perceptually processing the same face created representations that were relatively configuration-based. When the participants recalled the face in a delayed memory task, the verbal representation may have competed with the visual representation and lowered recognition accuracy (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990).
Recoding interference may also account for some variations between language groups in referent perception and memory. Language is a system of representational symbols; humans use language to represent both immediate events (e.g., “I am hungry now”) and non- immediate events (e.g., “Dov and Dre gave birth to happy Ilana in the summer of 2004”) (D’Andrade, 2002). As a representation sys- tem, language possesses an important property: Speakers of a language can use different refer- ring expressions to indicate the same referent (people with low IQs may be referred to as
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mentally retarded or intellectually challenged). Some referring expressions (e.g., a license or a permit) are semantically identical and evoke similar representations of the referent, whereas others carry very different connotations (e.g., a failure vs. a setback). Because languages vary in their vocabulary for referring to the same refer- ent, using different languages to characterize the same referent may evoke or create different linguistic and memory representations of the same referent. In the following subsections, we illustrate this argument with three research ex- amples: color codability and color memory, person memory, and figurative encoding of time.
Color Codability and Color Cognition
Color codability refers to the availability of a linguistic code in a language that allows a color to be expressed easily, rapidly, briefly, and uni- formly. The effects of color codability meet the criteria thought to be necessary to test the Whorfian hypothesis (see Rosch, 1987). First, variations in color vocabulary can be readily found in natural languages. Second, investiga- tors can measure the physical units of colors (e.g., wavelength) independent of how colors are coded in different languages. Third, mem- bers in different language communities should have more or less equivalent experiences with colors. Thus, difference in color memory across people in different language communities should be attributed not to their difference in experience with colors but to the variations in color codability across languages. Finally, nonlinguistic measures of color cognition— color perception, color memory—are available.
Our review of the research literature on the perceptual and memory effects of color codability leads to the following conclusions. First, the properties of the visual system may limit the range of language’s effects on color categorization. For example, no language has color categories that include two color spaces (e.g., yellow and blue) and exclude the connect- ing color space (e.g., green) (Davidoff, 2001). Second, within the constraints imposed by the visual system and the structure of the color space, different languages partition the color space differently (Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000, Experiment 1a). Third, when a color term is used to label a color, a linguistic representation of the color is created, which may bias the immediate perception and subse-
quent memory of the color. Fourth, variations in the availability of basic color terms across languages may produce different perceptions and memories of the color. Finally, although speakers of two languages with markedly dif- ferent color vocabularies may see and remem- ber the same colors differently, the differences in color perception or memory between these two language groups would disappear when linguistic encoding of colors is prohibited.
As a reaction to the linguistic determinism hypothesis, some researchers have sought to demonstrate the presence of a universal percep- tual order, independent of language. Findings from the early studies seemed to support a view of the “universal evolution” of color terminol- ogy (Berlin & Kay, 1969) that can be mapped onto the neurophysiological substrate of color perception (Kay & McDaniel, 1978). Other studies (e.g., Heider, 1972) conducted at about the same time showed that speakers of different languages have better memory for focal colors (paradigm exemplars of basic colors) than for nonfocal colors, and language has no effect on color memory. In a study of 24 languages, Heider found that focal colors, compared to nonfocal colors, are named more rapidly and given shorter names, indicating that focal col- ors are more codable than nonfocal ones. Heider also found that although there are only two color terms in Dugum Dani (the language of a Stone Age tribe in Irian Jaya), Dugum Dani–speakers have better recognition memory for focal colors than for nonfocal colors. Based on these results, Heider (1972; Rosch, 1973) concluded that the availability of an explicit linguistic code in one’s language has no effect on color memory. Instead, some universal perceptual–cognitive processes underlying the internal structure of color categories mediate both color naming and color memory.
The presence of a universal perceptual order leaves no room for any color codability effects on color perception and memory. However, later studies showed that although the proper- ties of the human visual system may limit the range of cognitive effects of color codability, the evidence for the presence of a universal per- ceptual order is not convincing. Other re- searchers also found that speakers of different languages partition the color spectrum slightly differently, and that the way the spectrum is partitioned in a language seems to have some important cognitive consequences on color per- ception and memory.
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In reaction to Heider’s claim (1972) that fo- cal colors are remembered better than nonfocal ones in all language groups, Lucy and Shweder (1979) argued that the focal colors used in Heider’s experiments had higher perceptual sa- lience than did the nonfocal colors. The inher- ent perceptual salience of focal colors might have given focal colors certain perceptual ad- vantage over the nonfocal colors in the mem- ory test. In the experiments conducted by Lucy and Shweder (1979; see also Garro, 1986; Lucy & Shweder, 1988), after controlling for percep- tual salience, focal and nonfocal colors had the same level of recognition accuracy.
Roberson et al. (2000) also suspect that in Heider’s (1972) study, the memory advantage of focal colors for Dugum Dani speakers was due to the participants’ tendency to choose a focal color in error for a nonfocal color. When monolingual Berinmo speakers were tested, there was also a memory advantage for focal over nonfocal colors. However, when the aforementioned response bias was corrected, the memory advantage disappeared (Roberson et al., 2000, Experiment 2a). In addition, Berinmo speakers learned to associate a nonfocal color with a picture just as fast as they associated a focal color to a picture (Roberson et al., 2000, Experiment 3b). These findings question whether color focality completely de- termines color memory in all language groups.
To show that the color vocabulary in a lan- guage can influence color memory, researchers have sought to establish the correspondence between how similarly two colors are named in a language, and how likely speakers of the lan- guage would confuse the two colors in a de- layed recognition memory test. If color vocabu- lary affects color perception, speakers of the language would find it harder to differentiate between two colors if they were named the same way in the language than if they were named differently.
Although the early findings showed that variations in the way the color space is parti- tioned in a language seem to have little effect on color memory, subsequent studies revealed some effects of linguistic encoding on color perception and color memory. In the first cross- language study of color codability effect, Heider and Olivier (1972) asked their infor- mants in two language groups (English- speaking Americans, and Dugum Dani) to per- form a color-naming task and a color- recognition task. American English has 11 ba-
sic color terms, and Dugum Dani has only two achromatic terms for color. A similarity matrix for color naming and a similarity matrix for color recognition were constructed for each language group. The color-naming matrices were constructed from how often the infor- mants gave different colors the same name, and the color recognition matrices were con- structed from how frequently the informants confused one color with another in the recogni- tion task. Multidimensional scaling performed on the four similarity matrices revealed marked differences between the two naming matrices, indicating that the stimulus colors are repre- sented very differently in the two languages. However, the two memory matrices were al- most identical, indicating that the two lan- guage groups have very similar memory repre- sentations of the stimulus colors.
However, a recent replication of the Heider and Olivier (1972) study found some effects of color codability on color memory. The partici- pants in this study (Roberson et al., 2000, Ex- periment 1a) were native English speakers and monolingual Berinmo speakers from three vil- lages in Papua, New Guinea. There are five ba- sic color terms in Berinmo, which do not map directly onto the basic color terms in English. The investigators used multidimensional scal- ing to estimate the probabilities that each pair of different colors in the stimulus array would be confused in Berinmo naming, Berinmo memory, English naming, and English memory. If two colors were likely to be confused in Berinmo naming, they were also likely to be confused in Berinmo memory (r = .54). How- ever, the correspondence between Berinmo memory and English memory patterns was also significant: If two colors were likely to be con- fused in Berinmo memory, then they were also likely to be confused in English memory (r = .44). More importantly, the correlation of .54 was reliably higher than the correlation of .44, indicating that the Berinmo patterns of naming and memory were more closely matched than were Berinmo memory and English memory patterns.
Another cross-language study also provided evidence for the effect of color codability on color perception. In this study, Kay and Kemp- ton (1984, Study 1) presented three color chips at a time to native speakers of English and speakers of Tarahumara (a Uto-Aztecan lan- guage of northern Mexico), and had them judge the similarity or difference of the three
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colors. Unlike English, Tarahumara lacks the lexical distinction between the color categories of “green” and “blue.” When the participants’ judgments were compared to the physical dis- tance of the stimuli in terms of their wave- lengths, the English-speaking participants, but not Tarahumara-speaking ones, systematically overestimated the distance between two colors when the green–blue color boundary passed between them.
However, Kay and Kempton (1984) believe that the English-speaking participants might have used a naming strategy when they were performing the judgment task. For instance, they might have labeled the color left of the green–blue lexical category boundary “green” and the two colors to the right of the boundary “blue.” Due to recoding interference, they overestimated the perceptual distance between the first color and other colors. However, the Tarahumara-speaking participants could not use this naming strategy, because their lan- guage lacks the lexical distinction between the color categories of “green” and “blue.”
Kay and Kempton’s (1984) reasoning is con- sistent with the findings from an earlier study of linguistic encoding and color experience. In this study, Thomas and DeCapito (1966) trained their participants to emit a finger-lift re- sponse to greenish-blue light with the wave- length of 490 µm and later tested their general- ization gradient. Participants in the named condition were led to label the 490 µm chro- matic light either as “green” or as “blue” when it was presented, whereas participants in the control condition were not. Participants who had labeled the colored light “green” showed stronger generalization responses to wave- lengths greater than 495 µm (the wavelengths of greenish light) compared to the participants who had labeled it “blue.” They also exhibited weaker generalization responses to wave- lengths shorter than 485 µm (wavelengths of bluish light). Participants in the control condi- tion yielded a generalization gradient interme- diate between the two groups.
To test their idea directly, Kay and Kempton (1984, Study 2) induced English-speaking par- ticipants to use both verbal labels (“blue” and “green”) to encode the same color. First, the par- ticipants saw the target color with a greener color, and they spontaneously encoded the tar- get color as the “bluer” color. Next, they saw the same target color with a bluer color, and spon- taneously encoded the target color as the
“greener” color. Following this, the participants evaluated the perceptual distances between the target color, the greener color, and the bluer color. Because the target color was encoded both as a bluer color (when it was paired with the greener color) and a greener color (when it was paired with the bluer color), the effects of the two encodings cancelled out each other. Under this circumstance, the English-speaking partici- pants’ judgments were similar to those of the Tarahumara speakers, and corresponded closely with the physical distance of the colors.
Roberson et al. (2000) reported similar find- ings in a conceptual replication of the Kay and Kempton (1984) experiments. The participants in the Roberson et al.’s experiments were Eng- lish speakers and Berinmo speakers. Like Tarahumara, Berinmo makes no lexical distinc- tion between “blue” and “green” colors. How- ever, English lacks linguistic labels that refer to nol and wor colors in Tarahumara. When asked to judge the perceptual similarity be- tween pairs of colors, English speakers judged two colors across the green–blue boundary as more dissimilar to the two colors within the green or blue category. However, they did not show such categorical perception for colors across the nol–wor boundary. The reverse was true for the Berinmo speakers. Similar results were obtained among both English speakers and Berinmo speakers in color category learn- ing and color memory. More important, in a subsequent color memory study, Roberson and Davidoff (2000) tested the effect of articulation suppression on color memory. The research participants were Berinmo speakers. In this study, when a verbal interference procedure was introduced to prevent subvocal encoding of the stimuli, the cross-category advantage in color memory was removed.
In short, variations in the availability of ba- sic color terms across languages may produce different perceptions and memories of color. Thus, speakers of two languages with mark- edly different color vocabularies may see and remember the same colors differently. How- ever, such cognitive differences seem to be me- diated by recoding interference, and would dis- appear when linguistic encoding of colors is prohibited.
Person Memory
Analogous language effects have been found in studies of social memory. In one study,
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Hoffman, Lau, and Johnson (1986) presented to their Chinese–English bilingual participants and native English-speaking participants per- sonality descriptions about several target per- sons. Some descriptions had high Chinese codability: The targets could be coded in a brief Chinese personality term (shi gu) that has no equivalent translations in English, or in more clumsy English expressions. The remaining ones had high English codability: The targets could be coded in a brief English personality term (“liberal”) that has no equivalent Chinese translations, or in more clumsy Chinese expres- sions. The Chinese–English bilinguals either read a Chinese version of the personality de- scriptions and were encouraged to think in Chinese, or read an English version of the same descriptions and were encouraged to think in English. The English-speaking participants read the English version of the descriptions. Five days later, all participants returned for the second session to make further inferences about the targets in the character descriptions. In response to descriptions of high Chinese codability, the Chinese–English bilinguals using Chinese, compared to the Chinese–English bilinguals using English and the English speak- ers, made more inferences that were congruent with the brief Chinese personality terms. They also made fewer inferences that were congruent with the brief English personality terms in re- sponse to the descriptions with high English codability.
In short, people use economical terms in their language to encode person information. The lexical term used to characterize person in- formation may influence how the information is represented subsequently.
Figurative Speech
Members of each culture have certain charac- teristic ways of describing events. The use of widely shared figurative descriptions of univer- sal experiences (e.g., the experience of time) of- fers a good illustration of the social-cognitive processes implicated in the relationship of lan- guage use and cognition. Recall that Whorf (1956) believed that some grammatical fea- tures in SAE languages (such as the three-tense system of verbs and the absence of formal grammatical markers for real and imaginary plurals) predispose speakers of SAE languages to represent time as a linear continuum that can be conveniently dissected into discrete
units (years, days, minutes, or milliseconds). Instead of focusing on the cognitive conse- quences of the grammatical features of a lan- guage, some researchers have investigated what the most coherent figurative expressions of time are in a particular language, and how they affect the language group’s experience of time. This research shows that different linguistic groups have developed different characteristic figurative expressions for encoding time. When a figurative expression is used to characterize time, it evokes a linguistic representation that embodies the figurative meanings in the expres- sion. This representation may in turn color the way the speaker experiences time.
Cultures differ in how time is represented metaphorically. In a cross-linguistic study, Zhou (2004) found that the most coherent cluster of time metaphors in the English lan- guage represents time as a moving object, and that the one in the Chinese language represents time as a container. She collected 140 Chinese and 131 English time metaphors from native Chinese and English speakers, and from several dictionaries of quotations in the two languages. Next, she had Chinese and English speakers judge the appropriateness of the metaphors in their language. Factor analyses performed on the appropriateness ratings showed that in the English language, metaphors representing time as bounded objects traveling speedily in space (e.g., winged chariot) accounted for 13.7% of the variance in the appropriateness ratings. These metaphorical representations render the perception of time as something that is meant to be caught, yet difficult to catch. Other clus- ters of time metaphors each accounted for less than 5% of the variance.
In the Chinese language, metaphors that rep- resent time as a boundless bearer of undefined or ill-defined objects, memories, and emotions (e.g., container, ocean) accounted for 13.5% of the variance of the appropriateness ratings (other clusters of time each accounted for less than 6% of the variance). These metaphors render the perception of time as a boundless container that extends in space, with an unlim- ited capacity for carrying human memories, ex- periences, and emotions.
English and Chinese speakers also use differ- ent directional metaphors to talk about time. For example, English speakers prefer using front–back terms when they talk about time (e.g., ahead of time, behind schedule). In con- trast, Chinese speakers prefer using up–down
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terms to describe time, referring to yesterday as one day up and tomorrow as one day down, for example (Boroditsky, 2001).
Research has shown that individuals can process the metaphorical meaning conveyed in a figurative expression at least as efficiently as they process the meaning conveyed in a literal expression (Glucksberg, 2001). In one experi- ment, Glucksberg had participants make speeded judgments of whether utterances such as “Some lawyers are sharks” are true or false. Participants who answered “no” responded to the utterances’ literal meanings and those who answered “yes” responded to the utterances’ figurative meanings. Affirmative responses were faster than negative ones, indicating that the figurative meanings were processed more efficiently than were the literal meanings.
Moreover, encoding an object with a figura- tive (vs. literal) expression may lead to memory distortion of the object in the direction of the figurative expression (Lau, Chiu, & Lee, 2001). For example, when a triangle is pre- sented, individuals who have been led to de- scribe it figuratively (“It looks like a moun- tain”) are less able to recognize the figure in a delayed memory test, compared to those who have been led to describe it literally (“It is a tri- angle”).
Similarly, encoding time with a figurative ex- pression may also influence how time is experi- enced. In a series of experiments, Boroditsky (2001) demonstrates how activating time meta- phors in a language may influence its speakers’ experience of time. In one experiment, English and Chinese speakers answered a true–false question about time (e.g., March comes earlier than April) after they were primed with the front–back relation (the vehicle of the domi- nant directional metaphor for time in English) or the up–down relation (the vehicle of the dominant directional metaphor for time in Chi- nese). The front–back and the up–down primes consisted of two different sets of true–false questions (e.g., “The black worm is ahead of the white worm” vs. “The black ball is above the white ball”). As expected, for the English speakers, the front–back primes produced faster response to the time question than did the up–down primes, and the reverse was true for the Chinese speakers. Furthermore, in the same series of experiments, after native English speakers had been trained to use the up–down metaphor for time, their response pattern looked like that of Chinese speakers. Appar-
ently, the dominant metaphor for time in a language community allows its members to process temporal information efficiently. When the metaphor is activated, people use it as a tool to process temporal information.
Conclusion
The research findings are consistent with the propositions mentioned earlier in this chapter. First, speakers use the characteristic ways of re- ferring to a state of affairs in their language as linguistic tools to encode experiences and ex- press thoughts. When (and only when) these tools are used to characterize certain state of affairs, they influence cognitions by evoking or creating a linguistic representation that com- petes with and overshadows the perceptual representation of that state of affairs.
Communication and Cognition
Language is not just a collection of words and rules. It is a communal tool kit that individuals in a speech community use to construct mean- ings (Bruner, 1990; Semin, 1998). A speech community shares not only the rules of a lan- guage but also common understandings of its use and interpretation (Brenneis, 2002). When individuals translate a thought into external speech, they must cast it in a form that is ap- propriate for linguistic operations and perti- nent to the communication function (Langacker, 1976). The lexical terms in a lan- guage limit the ways a thought can be ex- pressed verbally, and so do the contexts of lan- guage use, which include the ground rules and assumptions that govern usage, audience de- sign, and the immediate, ongoing, and emerg- ing properties of the communication situation (Krauss & Chiu, 1998).
The cognitive consequences of communica- tion received some attention in early color memory studies. Lantz and Strefflre (1964) ar- gued that color codability predicts color mem- ory only when color codability reflects how easy it is to describe the color accurately to an intended audience. To test this idea, they asked a group of participants (the encoders) to name an array of colors. Next, another group of par- ticipants (the decoders) were asked to identify the color associated with each of the color names generated by the first group of partici- pants. From the decoders’ performance, the in- vestigators derived a communicability score for
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each color. Finally, they measured the memora- bility of each color by administrating a recogni- tion memory task to a third group of partici- pants. Colors that were more communicable were easier to recognize.
In another study, communication accuracy and recognizability data were collected for the Farnsworth–Munsell color chips from native Spanish speakers and native speakers of Yucatec, a Mayan language (Stefflre, Vales, & Morley, 1966). The correlation between com- munication accuracy and recognition accuracy was .45 in the Yucatec-speaking sample and .59 in the Spanish-speaking sample. Both cor- relations were statistically reliable. However, communication accuracy in Spanish and com- munication accuracy in Yucatec were uncorrelated, indicating colors that are easy to communicate in one language community are not necessarily so in another. This finding also eliminates the alternative explanation that communicable colors are focal colors. Other studies also found that easily communicated colors in one language community are also easy to remember in that community (see also Garro, 1986; Lucy & Shweder, 1979, 1988).
How frequently different colors are men- tioned in communication may explain the posi- tive correlation of color communicability and recognizability. There may be high consensus in the language community on the referring ex- pressions for colors that are frequently refer- enced in communication. The established refer- ential communication norms for these colors may render them more communicable than other colors. Meanwhile, people may have better memory for the colors that they fre- quently encounter and talk about (Lau, Lee, & Chiu, 2004).
Construction of Shared Reality
Sperber (1996) suggests that the best way to study how culture spreads and evolves is by ex- amining how shared representations “are cognized by individuals and how they are com- municated within a group” (p. 97). If any state of affairs can be described differently, how do people collaboratively establish its referring ex- pression and consensual meaning?
Some researchers have examined how shared reality arises as communicators tune their mes- sage to the assumed beliefs and attitudes of the addressee. This research reveals that speakers estimate their addressee’s knowledge about a
referent when they formulate referring expres- sions (Clark & Carlson, 1982; Clark & Marshall, 1981; Clark & Murphy, 1982; Clark, Schreuder, & Buttrick, 1983; Krauss & Fussell, 1991, 1996; Krauss, Fussell, & Chen, 1995). Expressions tend to be briefer when the addressee is estimated to be knowledgeable about the referent, and vice versa (Fussell & Krauss, 1991, 1992; Lau, Chiu, & Hong, 2001). In addition, speakers tend to include in their communicative message expressions that are part of the established common ground (Fussell & Krauss, 1989a, 1989b; Krauss & Glucksberg, 1977; Krauss, Vivekananthan, & Weinheimer, 1968). Furthermore, when speak- ers learn that their addressee has a positive or negative attitude toward a target person, they would tune their descriptions of the target per- son in the direction of the addressee’s attitude toward the target person. Moreover, the speak- ers’ subsequent impressions of the target per- son become evaluatively consistent with the ad- dressee’s attitudes (Higgins & McCann, 1984; Higgins, McCann, & Fondacaro, 1982; McCann, Higgins, & Fondacaro, 1991).
The processes through which dyadic com- munication produces shared representations between two individuals may mediate the emergence of spatial distributions of shared representations in a collective, which in turn may lead to formation of complex systems of social representations, often referred to as cul- tures. According to the dynamic social impact theory (Latané, 1996), physical proximity in- creases the opportunity to communicate: Peo- ple are more likely to communicate with people in the same neighborhood or workplace than with people living far away. When people com- municate with others, shared representations are established. As communication continues, there is a tendency for sets of beliefs, values, and practices to become spatially differentiated (or clustered). At the same time, within a par- ticular clustered location, previously unrelated beliefs, values, or practices become associated (or correlated) and relatively homogeneous (or consolidated; Brauer, Judd, & Jacquelin, 2001). Although consolidation could ulti- mately result in complete amalgamation, clus- tering protects minorities from majority influ- ence, thus ensuring continuing diversity.
To simulate the hypothesized processes of culture formation, Latané and his col- leagues (Latané & Bourgeois, 1996; Latané & L’Herrou, 1996) organized participants into
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e-mail groups and informed them of the major- ity opinions. Each participant was allowed to communicate by e-mail with only a fixed num- ber of individuals (approximating physical constraints in real life). Over a number of elec- tronic sessions, opinions began to cluster to- gether. Thus, within each communication group, opinions became more homogenous, and previously uncorrelated issues became cor- related. However, at the end of the studies, even with incentives to agree with the opinions of the majority, there still remained pockets of minority opinions.
Similar results were obtained in a 3-year lon- gitudinal study of political socialization of business and social science students (Guimond & Palmer, 1985). In this study, over time, social sciences students developed a shared, coherent perspective about social problems. They be- came more likely than business students to at- tribute poverty and unemployment to systemic factors. Furthermore, previously uncorrelated beliefs about the causes of poverty became re- lated in the third year.
Summary
Language is not just a collection of symbols and formal rules; it is a framework for action in a language community. The use of language in human communication plays an important role in the development of shared cognitive styles and shared cognitions, which are core elements of culture. Language enables culture, but it does not determine the course of its develop- ment (Bruner, 1990).
The role of language use in cultural pro- cesses can be summarized as follows:
1. Language encodes cultural meanings. The characteristic expressions in a language af- ford economical ways of characterizing ex- periences and expressing thoughts. These expressions are likely to be used in everyday communication.
2. Using language to characterize a state of af- fairs may evoke or create linguistic repre- sentations that compete with and over- shadow the perceptual representations of that state of affairs.
3. A speech community shares the formal rules of a language, as well as the ground rules and assumptions that underlie language us- age. The contexts of language use (e.g., au- dience design) influence the forms linguistic
representations of certain state of affairs will take. Through communication, private cognitions are made public and directed to- ward a shared representation of the referent (Schegloff, 1991).
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS
The preceding analysis of the relationship of language and culture embodies a constructivist view of culture (see Chiu & Chen, 2004; Ng, Chiu, & Candlin, 2004). In this view, through the use of language as discourse, the shared re- ality expresses itself in communicative actions; that is, language plays a pivotal role in consti- tuting the existing social reality by providing a set of shared symbols for constructing shared meanings.
In a review, Lehman, Chiu, and Schaller (2004) discerned a lopsided emphasis in the psychology literature on cultural differences. Their review reminds researchers of the need for a body of psychological knowledge that ex- plains how discursive practices maintain the stability of a culture, and the role of language use in culture change.
Although cultural psychologists have not done much to uncover language’s role in the re- production and transformation of culture, some investigators have begun to examine how shared ideas are reproduced and propagate through interpersonal communication. The four aspects of this process that have received relatively more research attention are (1) repro- duction of conventional cultural knowledge through communication, (2) institutionaliza- tion of cultural knowledge in communication practices, (3) language as a carrier of cultural meanings, and (4) language as a marker of cul- tural identities.
Language Use and Reproduction of Culture
Communication and Reproduction of Conventional Cultural Ideas
Successful reproduction of cultures requires re- production of shared meanings in communica- tion (Sperber, 1996). In series of experiments, Lyons and Kashima (2001, 2003) found that conventional ideas are more likely to be repro- duced in dyadic communication compared to unconventional ones. These findings provide important leads into the discursive foundation
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of culture. If conventional ideas are more likely than unconventional ones to be included in communications, they should be more inherit- able in cultural transmission. As Sperber (1996, p. 83) puts it, cultural ideas that are “re- peatedly communicated and minimally trans- formed in the process will end up belonging to the culture.”
Institutionalization of Cultural Knowledge
Shared cognitions that emerge from communi- cation are often instituted in communicative practices. For instance, compared to East Asians, European Americans focus their atten- tion more on the object (vs. object–context re- lation; Masuda & Nisbett, 2001). This cultural difference is instituted in adult–child communi- cation. English-speaking American children use more nouns (which reference objects or ab- stract entities) and fewer verbs (which describe how the grammatical subject acts upon the ex- ternal environment or internal state) than do Mandarin-speaking children in China (Tardif, 1996; Tardif, Gelman, & Xu, 1999). More- over, English-speaking caregivers also empha- size nouns over verbs when they talk to chil- dren, whereas Mandarin-speaking caregivers have the reverse trend (Tardif, Shatz, & Naigles, 1998). As another example, the Con- fucian tradition in Chinese culture emphasizes moral and social standards, and Chinese fami- lies often reference such standards in personal storytelling, whereas American families typi- cally use personal storytelling as a medium of entertainment and affirmation (Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997).
Language Activates Cultural Meanings
Because of the close association of language use and culture, the presence of a language may evoke its associated cultural meanings. Earle (1969) reported the first experimental demon- stration of language priming effect and found that bilingual Hong Kong Chinese students are less dogmatic when they respond to the Dog- matism Scale (Rokeach, 1960) in English than when they answer the same questionnaire translated into Chinese. Earle proposes that Hong Kong bilinguals, who have learned Chi- nese and English in distinct settings, can main- tain two somewhat differently structured belief systems, reflecting the contexts in which they acquired the two languages and, more gener-
ally, the two language cultures. As such, the Chinese version of the questionnaire activates the more dogmatic Chinese language culture, and the English version activates the less dogmatic English language culture. Similar language-priming effects have been reported among Hong Kong Chinese, Chinese Can- adians, and Greek–Dutch bilinguals on sponta- neous self-concept, self-esteem, and causal at- tribution (Bond, 1983; Ross, Xun, & Wilson, 2002; Trafimow, Silverman, Fan, & Law, 1997; Verkuyten & Pouliasi, 2002).
Language as a Marker of Cultural Identity
Language can also be a marker of cultural iden- tity. There is consistent evidence that the lan- guage one speaks is an important dimension for both self- and social categorization (Bourhis, Giles, & Tajfel, 1973). Giles, Taylor and their associates compared the relative con- tributions of language, cultural background, and geographical residence to self- and social categorization in five groups: Welsh bilinguals from South Wales (Giles, Taylor, & Bourhis, 1977), English Canadians, French Canadians (Taylor, Bassili, & Aboud, 1973), Anglo Amer- icans and Franco Americans (Giles, Taylor, Lambert, & Albert, 1976). They found that for all groups, the language spoken was the most salient dimension of self- and ethnic identities.
In addition, listeners’ attitudes toward speakers of certain languages or dialects reflect their evaluations of the relative status of the speakers’ ethnolinguistic group (Brennan & Brennan, 1981; Callan, Gallois, & Forbes, 1983; Genesee & Holobow, 1989; Lyczak, Fu, & Ho, 1976; Mazurkewich, Fister-Stoga, Mawle, Somers, & Thibaudeau, 1986; Sebastian & Ryan, 1985; Tong, Hong, Lee, & Chiu, 1999). Furthermore, although people’s speech styles tend to converge (i.e., to become more like those of their partners), speakers may react to identity-threatening circumstances by accentuating speech and nonverbal differences between themselves and members of the other group (Bourhis et al., 1973; Bourhis & Giles, 1977; Bourhis, Giles, Leyens, & Tajfel, 1979; Taylor & Royer, 1980). Likewise, the presence of the language of an unfriendly out-group may also lead one to affirm the cultural values of one’s own group (Bond & Cheung, 1984; Bond & Yang, 1982; Yang & Bond, 1980).
Finally, speakers tend to describe in-group and out-group behaviors differently. For exam-
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ple, speakers spontaneously use more abstract verb phrases (e.g., hate) and fewer concrete verb phrases (e.g., hit) when they describe be- haviors of a stereotyped ethnocultural group than when they describe the behaviors of their own group (Hamilton, Gibbons, Stroessner, & Sherman, 1992). Encoding a behavior with an abstract verb implies that the behavior is stable and consistent across situations, whereas en- coding a behavior with a concrete verb limits the generality of the behavior to a concrete sit- uation (Semin & Fiedler, 1988, 1991). Thus, this finding suggests that behaviors of stereo- typed groups are likely to be linguistically en- coded as reflecting abstract qualities of the group members. However, the tendencies to de- scribe the behaviors of out-group members in abstract verb types are not uniform across dif- ferent types of behavior. Undesirable out-group behaviors tend to be described with abstract verb types, whereas desirable out-group behav- iors tend to be described with concrete verb types (Fiedler, Semin, & Finkenauer, 1993; Maass, Milesi, Zabbini, & Stahlberg, 1995; Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Semin, 1989). In short, the ways people use language may reinforce cultural stereotypes, as well as the boundary separating their own group from other ethnic groups.
Language and Culture Change
In a relatively impermeable culture, or a culture that has few contacts with other cultures, the communicative mechanisms described in the previous paragraph give rise to a relatively sta- ble cultural tradition. However, even in such relatively closed cultures, changes in the mode and means of production, technology, political system, and interdependence structure may present a need to open negotiation of meanings in public discourse. In a multicultural society, exposure to knowledge from different cultures highlights cultural contrasts and triggers a meaningful negotiation process that fuels cul- ture change (Ota, 2004). The tracking of com- municative messages in settings where intercul- tural contacts are frequent and intense may reveal how language and culture coevolve. For example, as tourists participate in international travel, they are socialized into the reality repre- sented in travel magazines, newspaper travel- ogues, and televised holiday programs. The language and rhetoric used in these media pro- vide the semiotic materials for analyzing how
the culture and identity of global citizens evolve (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2004).
Indeed, as the speed of globalization acceler- ates, communicative acts may function like a barometer of culture change. For instance, China has undergone rapid economic and so- cial transformation in the last two decades. How might this transformation change the col- lectivist values in China? Zhang and Shavitt (2003), who analyzed the values promoted in Chinese advertising, found that both moder- nity and individualism predominate in current Chinese advertising. In addition, individualism and modern values are more pervasive in mag- azine advertisements (which target young con- sumers) than in television commercials (which target older consumers). All these changes sug- gest that after half a century of psychological research and intense debates on language’s role in cognitive and cultural processes, the field is still open, with exciting territories that remain to be discovered and explored.
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