LINGUISTIC INFLUENCES ON THINKING: TESTING THE HYPOTHESIS

In the prior chapter we have seen how spatial description and spatial thinking can co-vary cross-culturally, and we have seen too that there are methods that can be employed to demonstrate this in a non-anecdotal way. In this chapter, we turn to further develop these methods, and then apply them to test the major hypothesis that is at stake in a large cross-cultural sample. Here we will be concerned not with linguistic details, but only with the non-linguistic psychological parameters that seem to correlate with them. The hypothesis in its strongest, crudest form would run as follows:

Many riders are immediately in order. What does ‘used in a language’ mean? We need to note that most languages provide special expressions for more than one frame of reference, and there are conventions for the kinds of circumstances each frame of reference is used in (see, e.g., Tversky 1996). So we need to relativize the statement to situations of use. Second, what does ‘constrain or determine’ mean? The idea behind the hypothesis is that community-wide conventions about what linguistic expressions mean and how they are to be used will tend to induce a way of thinking in which the immediate, unreflective memory coding matches the kind of coding required to describe an arbitrary spatial array.