Language and thought

Language and thought are studied in relation to one another: language may shape cognition and perception, while cognition enables language use and learning.

Linguistic relativity: The hypothesis that differences between languages influence how their speakers think or perceive. It captures the claim that language can shape habitual thought without determining every possible thought.
Gopnik and Choi spatial-language study: A study comparing how Korean-speaking and English-speaking children use language and solve spatial tasks. It examined whether language practices around spatial relations correlate with children's nonverbal reasoning.
Inner speech: The experience of using language silently in the mind. It is a direct case in which linguistic activity accompanies deliberate reasoning and self-regulation.
Semantics: The study of meaning in words, phrases, and sentences. Meaning is the bridge between linguistic forms and the concepts they express.
Wilhelm von Humboldt: A German philosopher and linguist who argued that language shapes how communities understand the world. His work helped establish the idea that languages embody distinctive ways of thinking.
Linguistic determinism: The strong claim that the language a person speaks determines the thoughts that person can have. It is a stronger version of linguistic influence, often contrasted with more limited relativity claims.
Boroditsky time and space studies: Experiments testing whether spatial metaphors in language influence how people think about time. They provide a prominent test of language-linked differences in temporal reasoning.
Categorical perception: The tendency to perceive continuous differences as belonging to distinct categories. Words may sharpen category boundaries, changing how distinctions are noticed or remembered.
Conceptual representation: The mental encoding of objects, properties, events, and relations. It concerns the thought structures whose relationship to language is at issue.
Franz Boas: An anthropologist who emphasized the diversity of human languages and the need to study them in context. His approach challenged assumptions that European languages provide a universal measure of thought.

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