Reading List
Au, T. "Chinese and English counterfactuals: The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis revisited." Cognition 15(1-3) (1983): 155-187.
------. "Counterfactuals: In reply to Alfred Bloom." Cognition 17(3) (1984): 289-302.
Bialystok, E. "Cognitive complexity and attentional control in the bilingual mind." Child Development 70(3) (1999): 636-644.
Bloom, A. "Caution--the words you use may affect what you say: A response to Au." Cognition 17(3) (1984): 275-287.
Boroditsky, L. "Does language shape thought? English and Mandarin speakers' conceptions of time." Cognitive Psychology 43(1) (2001): 1-22.
PubMed abstract: Does the language you speak affect how you think about the world? This question is taken up in three experiments. English and Mandarin talk about time differently--English predominantly talks about time as if it were horizontal, while Mandarin also commonly describes time as vertical. This difference between the two languages is reflected in the way their speakers think about time. In one study, Mandarin speakers tended to think about time vertically even when they were thinking for English (Mandarin speakers were faster to confirm that March comes earlier than April if they had just seen a vertical array of objects than if they had just seen a horizontal array, and the reverse was true for English speakers). Another study showed that the extent to which Mandarin-English bilinguals think about time vertically is related to how old they were when they first began to learn English. In another experiment native English speakers were taught to talk about time using vertical spatial terms in a way similar to Mandarin. On a subsequent test, this group of English speakers showed the same bias to think about time vertically as was observed with Mandarin speakers. It is concluded that (1) language is a powerful tool in shaping thought about abstract domains and (2) one's native language plays an important role in shaping habitual thought (e.g., how one tends to think about time) but does not entirely determine one's thinking in the strong Whorfian sense.
Boroditsky, L., and Z. Trusova. "Cross-linguistic differences in verb aspect and their effects on thought: Encoding completion in English and Russian." (in preparation).
Boroditsky, L., L. Schmidt, and W. Phillips. "Sex, Syntax, and Semantics." To appear in Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Cognition. Edited by Gentner and Goldin-Meadow. (In press).
Boroditsky, L., W. Ham, and M. Ramscar. "What is universal about event perception? Comparing English and Indonesian speakers." Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 2002.
Bowerman, M., and S. Choi. "Shaping meanings for language: Universal and language-specific in the acquisition of spatial semantic categories." In Language acquisition and conceptual development. Edited by M. Bowerman, and S. C. Levinson. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2001.
Brown, R., and E. Lenneberg. "A study in language and cognition." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 49: 454-462.
Butterworth, B. Chap. 4 in What counts. NY: Free Press.
Carey, S. "Knowledge acquisition: enrichment or conceptual change?" In The Epigenesis of Mind: Essays in Biology and Cognition. Edited by S. Carey, and R. Gelman. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1991, pp. 257-291.
------. "Beyond Core Knowledge: Natural Number." Chap. 7 in The Origin of Concepts.
Clark, H. "Space, time, semantics, and the child." In Cognitive development and the acquisition of language. Edited by T. E. Moore, 1973.
Colunga, E., and L. B. Smith. "Learning to learn words: A cross-linguistic study of the shape and material biases." Poster presented at the BU Language Acquisition Conference.
Carruthers, P. "The cognitive functions of language." Behavioral & Brain Sciences. (In press).
Davidoff, J., I. Davies, and D. Roberson. "Color categories of a stone-age tribe." Nature 398 (1999): 203-204. (Link to abstract available on PubMed.)
de Villiers, J.G., and J. Pyers. "Complements to Cognition: A longitudinal study of the relationship between complex syntax and false-belief-understanding." In Cognitive Development. 2002.
de Villiers, J.G., and P. A. de Villiers. Language for Thought: coming to understand False Beliefs. Chapter prepared for Whither Whorf? (in press)
------. "Linguistic determinism and false belief." In Children's Reasoning and the Mind. Edited by P. Mitchell and K. Riggs. Hove, U.K.: Psychology Press, 2000.
Dehaene, S. "The Language of Number." Chap. 4 in The Number Sense.
------. Chap. 1 in The Number Sense. Pp. 17-23.
------. Chap. 3 in The Number Sense. Pp. 73-76.
Dehaene, S., E. Spelke, P. Pinel, R. Stanescu, and S. Tsivkin. "Sources of mathematical thinking: Behavioral and brain-imaging evidence." Science 284 (1999): 970-974.
PubMed abstract: Does the human capacity for mathematical intuition depend on linguistic competence or on visuo-spatial representations? A series of behavioral and brain-imaging experiments provides evidence for both sources. Exact arithmetic is acquired in a language-specific format, transfers poorly to a different language or to novel facts, and recruits networks involved in word-association processes. In contrast, approximate arithmetic shows language independence, relies on a sense of numerical magnitudes, and recruits bilateral areas of the parietal lobes involved in visuo-spatial processing. Mathematical intuition may emerge from the interplay of these brain systems.
Foundalis, H. "Evolution of gender in Indo-European languages." Proceedings of the 24th Annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. 2002.
Gathercole, and Baddeley. "Calculation speed and arithmetic learning by children who speak different languages: (TBA)."
Gennari, S., S. Sloman, B. Malt, and W. Fitch. "Motion events in language and cognition." Cognition 83(1) (2002): 49-79.
PubMed abstract: This study investigated whether different lexicalization patterns of motion events in English and Spanish predict how speakers of these languages perform in non-linguistic tasks. Using 36 motion events, we compared English and Spanish speakers' linguistic descriptions to their performance on two non-linguistic tasks: recognition memory and similarity judgments. We investigated the effect of language processing on non-linguistic performance by varying the nature of the encoding before testing for recognition and similarity. Participants encoded the events while describing them verbally or not. No effect of language was obtained in the recognition memory task after either linguistic or non-linguistic encoding and in the similarity task after non-linguistic encoding. We did find a linguistic effect in the similarity task after verbal encoding, an effect that conformed to language-specific patterns. Linguistic descriptions directed attention to certain aspects of the events later used to make a non-linguistic judgment. This suggests that linguistic and non-linguistic performance are dissociable, but language-specific regularities made available in the experimental context may mediate the speaker's performance in specific tasks.
Gentner, D., S. Brem, R. W. Ferguson, A. B. Markman, B. B. Levidow, P. Wolff, and K. D. Forbus. "Analogical reasoning and conceptual change: A case study of Johannes Kepler." The Journal of the Learning Sciences 6(1) (1997): 3-40.
Giaquinto. "Mental number lines." In Culture and the Innate Mind. Edited by P. Carruthers. (In press).
Gordon, P. "Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from Amazonia." (Under review).
Goldstone, R., Y. Lippa, and R. Shiffrin. "Altering object representations through category learning." Cognition 78(1) (2001): 27-43.
PubMed abstract: Previous research has shown that objects that are grouped together in the same category become more similar to each other and that objects that are grouped in different categories become increasingly dissimilar, as measured by similarity ratings and psychophysical discriminations. These findings are consistent with two theories of the influence of concept learning on similarity. By a Strategic Judgment Bias account, the categories associated with objects are explicitly used as cues for determining similarity, and objects that are categorized together are judged to be more similar because similarity is not only a function of the objects themselves, but also the objects' category labels. By a Changed Object Description account, category learning alters the description of the objects themselves, emphasizing properties that are relevant for categorization. A new method for distinguishing between these accounts is introduced which measures the difference between the similarity ratings of categorized objects to a neutral object. The results indicate both strategic biases based on category labels and genuine representational change, with the strategic bias affecting mostly objects belonging to different categories and the representational change affecting mostly objects belonging to the same category.
Guiora, A. "Language and concept formation: A cross-lingual analysis." Behavior Science Research 18(3) (1983): 228-256.
Hermer-Vasquez, L., E. S. Spelke, and A. S. Katsnelson. "Sources of flexibility in human cognition: Dual-task studies of space and language." Cognitive Psychology 39 (1999): 3-36.
PubMed abstract: Under many circumstances, children and adult rats reorient themselves through a process which operates only on information about the shape of the environment (e.g., Cheng, 1986; Hermer & Spelke, 1996). In contrast, human adults relocate themselves more flexibly, by conjoining geometric and nongeometric information to specify their position (Hermer & Spelke, 1994). The present experiments used a dual-task method to investigate the processes that underlie the flexible conjunction of information. In Experiment 1, subjects reoriented themselves flexibly when they performed no secondary task, but they reoriented themselves like children and adult rats when they engaged in verbal shadowing of continuous speech. In Experiment 2, subjects who engaged in nonverbal shadowing of a continuous rhythm reoriented like nonshadowing subjects, suggesting that the interference effect in Experiment 1 did not stem from general limits on working memory or attention but from processes more specific to language. In further experiments, verbally shadowing subjects detected and remembered both nongeometric information (Experiment 3) and geometric information (Experiments 1, 2, and 4), but they failed to conjoin the two types of information to specify the positions of objects (Experiment 4). Together, the experiments suggest that humans' flexible spatial memory depends on the ability to combine diverse information sources rapidly into unitary representations and that this ability, in turn, depends on natural language.
Hespos, S. J., and Spelke, E. S. Conceptual precursors to language. (Unpublished).
Hunt, E., and F. Agnoli. "The Whorfian hypothesis: A cognitive psychology perspective." Psychological Review 98(3) (1991): 377-389.
Imai, M., and D. Gentner. "A crosslinguistic study of early word meaning: universal ontology and linguistic influence." Cognition 62 (1997): 169-200.
PubMed abstract: This research concerns how children learn the distinction between substance names and object names. Quine (1969) proposed that children learn the distinction through learning the syntactic distinctions inherent in count/mass grammar. However, Soja et al. (1991) found that English-speaking 2-year-olds, who did not seem to have acquired count/mass grammar, distinguished objects from substances in a word extension task, suggesting a pre-linguistic ontological distinction. To test whether the distinction between object names and substance names is conceptually or linguistically driven, we repeated Soja et al.'s study with English- and Japanese-speaking 2-, 2.5-, and 4-year-olds and adults. Japanese does not make a count-mass grammatical distinction: all inanimate nouns are treated alike. Thus if young Japanese children made the object-substance distinction in word meaning, this would support the early ontology position over the linguistic influence position. We used three types of standards: substances (e.g., sand in an S-shape), simple objects (e.g., a kidney-shaped piece of paraffin) and complex objects (e.g., a wood whisk). The subjects learned novel nouns in neutral syntax denoting each standard entity. They were then asked which of the two alternatives--one matching in shape but not material and the other matching in material but not shape--would also be named by the same label. The results suggest the universal use of ontological knowledge in early word learning. Children in both languages showed differentiation between (complex) objects and substances as early as 2 years of age. However, there were also early cross-linguistic differences. American and Japanese children generalized the simple object instances and the substance instances differently. We speculate that children universally make a distinction between individuals and non-individuals in word learning but that the nature of the categories and the boundary between them is influenced by language.
Imai, M. and R. Mazuko. "Re-evaluation of linguistic relativity: Language-specific categories and the role of universal ontological knowledge in the construal of individuals." (In press).
Jakobson, R. "On linguistic aspects of translation." In On translation. Edited by R.A. Brower. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 232-239.
Kuhl, P. K. "Language, mind & brain: Experience alters perception." In The New Cognitive Neurosciences. Edited by M. Gazzaniga. MIT Press, 2000.
Lemer, C. Chapter from her thesis (in French!) or unpublished manuscript in English: TBA, 2000.
Levinson, S. C., S. Kita, D. B. M. Haun, and B. H. Rasch. "Returning the tables: Language affects spatial reasoning." Cognition 84 (2002): 155-188.
PubMed abstract: Li and Gleitman (Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning. Cognition, in press) seek to undermine a large-scale cross-cultural comparison of spatial language and cognition which claims to have demonstrated that language and conceptual coding in the spatial domain covary (see, for example, Space in language and cognition: explorations in linguistic diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press; Language 74 (1998) 557): the most plausible interpretation is that different languages induce distinct conceptual codings. Arguing against this, Li and Gleitman attempt to show that in an American student population they can obtain any of the relevant conceptual codings just by varying spatial cues, holding language constant. They then argue that our findings are better interpreted in terms of ecologically-induced distinct cognitive styles reflected in language. Linguistic coding, they argue, has no causal effects on non-linguistic thinking--it simply reflects antecedently existing conceptual distinctions. We here show that Li and Gleitman did not make a crucial distinction between frames of spatial reference relevant to our line of research. We report a series of experiments designed to show that they have, as a consequence, misinterpreted the results of their own experiments, which are in fact in line with our hypothesis. Their attempts to reinterpret the large cross-cultural study, and to enlist support from animal and infant studies, fail for the same reasons. We further try to discern exactly what theory drives their presumption that language can have no cognitive efficacy, and conclude that their position is undermined by a wide range of considerations.
Li, P., and L. R. Gleitman. "Turning the tables: Language and spatial reasoning." Cognition 83 (2002): 265-294.
PubMed abstract: This paper investigates possible influences of the lexical resources of individual languages on the spatial organization and reasoning styles of their users. That there are such powerful and pervasive influences of language on thought is the thesis of the Whorf-Sapir linguistic relativity hypothesis which, after a lengthy period in intellectual limbo, has recently returned to prominence in the anthropological, linguistic, and psycholinguistic literatures. Our point of departure is an influential group of cross-linguistic studies that appear to show that spatial reasoning is strongly affected by the spatial lexicon in everyday use in a community (e.g. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. C. (1993). Linguistic and nonlinguistic coding of spatial arrays: explorations in Mayan cognition (Working Paper No. 24). Nijmegen: Cognitive Anthropology Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics; Cognitive Linguistics 6 (1995) 33). Specifically, certain groups customarily use an externally referenced spatial-coordinate system to refer to nearby directions and positions ("to the north") whereas English speakers usually employ a viewer-perspective system ("to the left"). Prior findings and interpretations have been to the effect that users of these two types of spatial system solve rotation problems in different ways, reasoning strategies imposed by habitual use of the language-particular lexicons themselves. The present studies reproduce these different problem-solving strategies in speakers of a single language (English) by manipulating landmark cues, suggesting that language itself may not be the key causal factor in choice of spatial perspective. Prior evidence on rotation problem solution from infants (e.g. Acredolo, L.P. (1979). Laboratory versus home: the effect of environment on the 9-month-old infant's choice of spatial reference system. Developmental Psychology, 15 (6), 666-667) and from laboratory animals (e.g. Restle, F. (1975). Discrimination of cues in mazes: a resolution of the place-vs.-response question. Psychological Review, 64, 217-228) suggests a unified interpretation of the findings: creatures approach spatial problems differently depending on the availability and suitability of local landmark cues. The results are discussed in terms of the current debate on the relation of language to thought, with particular emphasis on the question of why different cultural communities favor different perspectives in talking about space.
Lohman, H., and M. Tomasello. The role of language in the development of false belief understanding. (Manuscript).
Lucy, J. Grammatical categories and cognition: A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (1992): 72-84.
------. Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, England, pp. 208-256.
Lucy, J. A., and S. Gaskins. "Interaction of language type and referent type in the development of nonverbal classification preferences." In Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought. Edited by D. Gentner and S. Goldin-Meadow. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (In press).
McDonough, L., S. Choi, and J. Mandler. "Understanding spatial relations: Flexible Infants, Lexical Adults." To appear in Cognitive Psychology. (In press).
PubMed abstract: Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, preferential-looking tasks with 9- to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either English or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as 'in' and 'on' in English by spatial prepositions and 'kkita' and 'nohta' in Korean by spatial verbs) and tight containment vs. loose containment (both grammaticized as 'in' in English but separately as 'kkita' and 'nehta' in Korean). Infants categorized both contrasts, suggesting conceptual readiness for learning such spatial semantics in either language. English-speaking adults categorized tight containment vs. loose support, but not tight vs. loose containment. However, Korean-speaking adults were successful at this latter contrast, which is lexicalized in their language. The adult data suggest that some spatial relations that are salient during the preverbal stage become less salient if language does not systematically encode them.
Miller, K., S. M. Major, H. Shu, and H. Zhang. "Ordinal knowledge: number names and number concepts in Chinese and English." Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology 54 (2000): 129-139.
PubMed abstract: Previous research has demonstrated cross-language variation in early counting associated with linguistic differences in number-naming systems. Ordinal number names are typically learned later than cardinal names, but languages also differ in the regularity with which they form these names. Elementary school children in China and the U.S. showed differences in the acquisition and use of ordinal numbers corresponding to linguistic differences in ordinal names in their native languages. On tasks assessing children's conceptual knowledge of ordinal relations, a more complicated picture emerged. These results suggest that (a) children induce their language's set of ordinal number names by generalization based on rules sanctioned by early examples, and (b) the relation between ordinal names and ordinal concepts is a complex one, with language only one source of difficulty in understanding ordinal relations. Implications for studies of the relation between linguistic structure and cognitive development are discussed, in particular the possibility that effects of linguistic differences may vary for different levels of development and for different aspects of cognition.
Mix, K. S., J. Huttenlocher, and S.C. Levine "Do preschool children recognize auditory-visual correspondences?" In Child Development 67, 1592, 1608.
PubMed abstract: The present study investigated the ability of 3- and 4-year-old children to perform tasks which require matching sets of sounds to numerically equivalent visual displays. We found that 3-year-olds performed at chance on the auditory-visual matching task, while 4-year-olds performed significantly above chance. There is evidence that mastery of the linguistic counting system is related to success on this task. These findings are unexpected given previous research reporting that 6-8-month-olds can detect the numerical equivalence between a set of sounds and items in a visual display.
Mori, I. "A cross-cultural study on children's conception of speed and duration: A comparison between Japanese and Thai children." Japanese Psychological Research 18(3) (1976): 105-112.
Morikawa, K., and M. McBeath. "Lateral motion bias associated with reading direction." Vision Research 32(6) (1992): 1137-1141.
PubMed abstract: We found that when Americans view ambiguous lateral long-range apparent motion, they exhibit a robust bias to experience leftward movement. In successive experiments, right-handers and left-handers, and left-side drivers from Japan equally manifested this leftward bias. However, bilingual viewers whose first language reads from right to left exhibited no lateral bias. Furthermore, the bilingual sample produced a significant correlation between exposure to English and extent of leftward motion bias. The findings provide strong evidence that reading habits can influence directionality in motion perception.
Mulford, R. "Comprehension of Icelandic pronoun gender: Semantic versus formal factors." Journal-of-Child-Language 12(2) (1985): 443-453.
Oh, K. Habitual Patterns of Language Use and Thinking for Speaking: A Whorfian Effect on Motion Events. (Unpublished).
Papafragou, A., C. Massey, and L. Gleitman. "Shake, rattle, 'n' roll: The representation of motion in language and cognition." Cognition 84(2) (2002): 189-219.
PubMed abstract: Languages vary strikingly in how they encode motion events. In some languages (e.g. English), manner of motion is typically encoded within the verb, while direction of motion information appears in modifiers. In other languages (e.g. Greek), the verb usually encodes the direction of motion, while the manner information is often omitted, or encoded in modifiers. We designed two studies to investigate whether these language-specific patterns affect speakers' reasoning about motion. We compared the performance of English and Greek children and adults (a) in nonlinguistic (memory and categorization) tasks involving motion events, and (b) in their linguistic descriptions of these same motion events. Even though the two linguistic groups differed significantly in terms of their linguistic preferences, their performance in the nonlinguistic tasks was identical. More surprisingly, the linguistic descriptions given by subjects within language also failed to correlate consistently with their memory and categorization performance in the relevant regards. For the domain studied, these results are consistent with the view that conceptual development and organization are largely independent of language-specific labeling practices. The discussion emphasizes that the necessarily sketchy nature of language use assures that it will be at best a crude index of thought.
Pederson, E., E. Danziger, D. Wilkins, S. Levinson, S. Kita, and G. Senft. "Semantic typology and spatial conceptualization." Language 74 (1998): 557-589.
Perez-Pereira, M. "The acquisition of gender: What Spanish children tell us." Journal-of-Child-Language 18(3) (1991): 571-590.
PubMed abstract: Data from an experiment on gender acquisition with 160 Spanish children from four to eleven years of age are presented in this paper. In Spanish there are three possible clues (semantic, morphophonological and syntactic), that speakers can use to determine the gender of a noun and the agreement of other variable elements accompanying it. Items where only one of the clues was present, items where there was a combined effect of two of them in agreement (both were feminine or masculine), and items where clues were in conflict (one masculine and the other feminine) were introduced in the experiment. This experimental manipulation made it possible to test the relative strength of the different types of competing clues. In particular, the aim of the present study was to determine the relative importance of intralinguistic and extralinguistic clues, as evidenced by the ability of Spanish children to recognize the gender of a noun upon hearing it in a particular frame, and consequently, to establish the agreement of other variable elements accompanying it. A procedure similar to that used by Karmiloff-Smith (1979) was employed. The results (which are compared with those obtained in other languages) give support to the theoretical view that children pay for more attention to syntactic and morphophonological (intralinguistic) information than to semantic (extralinguistic) information.
Pinker, S. Chap. 3 in The Language Instinct: How the mind creates language. William Morrow & Co.: New York, 1994.
Roberson, D., J. Davidoff, and L. Shapiro. "Squaring the circle: The cultural relativity of 'good' shape." To appear in Journal of Cognition and Culture. (In press).
Rosch, E.H. "Natural categories." Cognitive Psychology 4 (1973): 328-350.
Rosch Heider, E., and D. C. Olivier. "The structure of the color space in naming and memory for two languages." Cognitive Psychology 3 (1972): 337-354.
Sera, M., C. Berge, and J. del Castillo. "Grammatical and conceptual forces in the attribution of gender by English and Spanish speakers." Cognitive Development 9, 3 (1994): 261-292.
Shusterman, A. and E. Spelke. Unpublished paper on effects of spatial language training on children's navigation.
Siegal, M., R. Varley, and S. C. Want. "Mind over grammar: reasoning in aphasia and development." Trends Cogn Sci.: 296-301.
PubMed abstract: Research on propositional reasoning (involving 'theory of mind' understanding) in adult patients with aphasia reveals that reasoning can proceed in the absence of explicit grammatical knowledge. Conversely, evidence from studies with deaf children shows that the presence of such knowledge is not sufficient to account for reasoning. These findings are in keeping with recent research on the development of naming, categorization and imitation, indicating that children's reasoning about objects and actions is guided by inferences about others' communicative intentions. We discuss the extent to which reasoning is supported by, and tied to, language in the form of conversational awareness and experience rather than grammar.
Slobin, D. I. "From 'thought and language' to 'thinking for speaking'." In Rethinking linguistic relativity. Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language, No. 17. Edited by J. J. Gumperz, and S. C. Levinson. 1996, pp. 70-96.
Slobin, D. "The many ways to search for a frog: Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events." To appear in Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives. Edited by S. Strömqvist, and L. Verhoeven. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003.(In press).
Smith, C., and C. Unger. "What's in dots-per-box? Conceptual boot-strapping with stripped-down visual analogs." Journal of the Learning Sciences 6 (1997): 143-181.
Spelke, E. S., and S. Tsivkin "Language and number: A bilingual training study." Cognition 78 (2001): 45-88.
PubMed abstract: Three experiments investigated the role of a specific language in human representations of number. Russian-English bilingual college students were taught new numerical operations (Experiment 1), new arithmetic equations (Experiments 1 and 2), or new geographical or historical facts involving numerical or non-numerical information (Experiment 3). After learning a set of items in each of their two languages, subjects were tested for knowledge of those items, and new items, in both languages. In all the studies, subjects retrieved information about exact numbers more effectively in the language of training, and they solved trained problems more effectively than untrained problems. In contrast, subjects retrieved information about approximate numbers and non-numerical facts with equal efficiency in their two languages, and their training on approximate number facts generalized to new facts of the same type. These findings suggest that a specific, natural language contributes to the representation of large, exact numbers but not to the approximate number representations that humans share with other mammals. Language appears to play a role in learning about exact numbers in a variety of contexts, a finding with implications for practice in bilingual education. The findings prompt more general speculations about the role of language in the development of specifically human cognitive abilities.
Stanescu-Cosson, R., P. Pinel, P.-F. van de Moortele, D. Le Bihan, L. Cohen, and S. Dehaene. "Understanding dissociations in dyscalculia: A brain imaging study of the impact of number size on the cerebral networks for exact and approximate calculation." Brain 123 (2000): 2240-2255.
PubMed abstract: Neuropsychological studies have revealed different subtypes of dyscalculia, including dissociations between exact calculation and approximation abilities, and an impact of number size on performance. To understand the origins of these effects, we measured cerebral activity with functional MRI at 3 Tesla and event-related potentials while healthy volunteers performed exact and approximate calculation tasks with small and large numbers. Bilateral intraparietal, precentral, dorsolateral and superior prefrontal regions showed greater activation during approximation, while the left inferior prefrontal cortex and the bilateral angular regions were more activated during exact calculation. Increasing number size during exact calculation led to increased activation in the same bilateral intraparietal regions as during approximation, as well the left inferior and superior frontal gyri. Event-related potentials gave access to the temporal dynamics of calculation processes, showing that effects of task and of number size could be found as early as 200-300 ms following problem presentation. Altogether, the results reveal two cerebral networks for number processing. Rote arithmetic operations with small numbers have a greater reliance on left-lateralized regions, presumably encoding numbers in verbal format. Approximation and exact calculation with large numbers, however, put heavier emphasis on the left and right parietal cortices, which may encode numbers in a non-verbal quantity format. Subtypes of dyscalculia can be explained by lesions disproportionately affecting only one of these networks.
Strange, W., and Dittman, S. "Effects of discrimination training on the perception of /r-l/ by Japanese adults learning English." Perception & Psychophysics 36 (1984): 131-145.
Tversky, B., S. Kugelmass, and A. Winter. "Cross-cultural and developmental trends in graphic productions." Cognitive-Psychology 23(4) (1991): 515-557
Tomasello, M. "Perceiving intentions and learning words in the second year of life." In Bowerman, M. and Levinson, S. (2001).
Werker, J. F. "Becoming a native listener." American Scientist 77, 1989.
Yamada, R. A., and Y. Tohkura. "The effects of experimental variables on the perception of American English /r/ and /l/ by Japanese listeners." In Perception & Psychophysics 52 (1992): 376-392.
PubMed abstract: The effects of variations in response categories, subjects' perception of natural speech, and stimulus range on the identification of American English /r/ and /l/ by native speakers of Japanese were investigated. Three experiments using a synthesized /rait/-/lait/ series showed that all these variables affected identification and discrimination performance by Japanese subjects. Furthermore, some of the perceptual characteristics of /r/ and /l/ for Japanese listeners were clarified: (1) Japanese listeners identified some of the stimuli of the series as /w/. (2) A positive correlation between the perception of synthesized stimuli and naturally spoken stimuli was found. Japanese listeners who were able to easily identify naturally spoken stimuli perceived the synthetic series categorically but still perceived a /w/ category on the series. (3) The stimulus range showed a striking effect on identification consistency; identification of /r/ and /l/ was strongly affected by the stimulus range, the /w/ identification less so. This indicates that Japanese listeners tend to make relative judgments between /r/ and /l/.
Yoshida, H., and L. B. Smith. Shifting Ontological Boundaries: How Japanese- and English Speaking Children Generalize Names for Animals and Artifacts. (In press).