I will describe three projects where language makes a difference. In verifying parts of the body, naming seems to elicit functional information about bodies over and above perceptual information. In segmenting events, describing each segment results in more top-down encoding. Moreover, the descriptions give insight into the ways events are organized. Finally, retelling the events of one's life from a perspective yields distortions in memory in the direction of that perspective.
Language is an elementary form of teaching.
Westerners are more analytic, paying attention primarily to the object and the categories to which it belongs and using rules, including formal logic, to understand its behavior. The two types of cognitive processes are embedded in different na ve metaphysical systems and tacit epistemologies. I speculate that the origin of these differences is traceable to markedly different social systems. The theory and the evidence presented call into question long held assumptions about basic cognitive processes and even about the appropriateness of the process-content distinction.