When Is Language a Window into the Mind? Looking Beyond Words to Infer Conceptual Categories

When Is Language a Window into the Mind? Looking Beyond Words to Infer Conceptual Categories Kevin J. Holmes (kjholmes@berkeley.edu) Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, 1203 Dwinelle Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720 USA Phillip Wolff (pwolff@emory.edu) Department of Psychology, Emory University, 36 Eagle Row, Atlanta, GA 30322 USA Dissociations between words and concepts Abstract A large literature documents the pervasiveness of semantic diversity, with cross-linguistic variation in word meaning observed in such disparate domains as artifacts (Malt et al., 1999), spatial relations (Levinson et al., 2003), and number (Frank et al., 2008), among many others. If language is a window into the mind at the level of words, such diversity should also be observed at the conceptual level. That is, speakers of different languages should perform differently on relevant nonlinguistic tasks, in a manner that aligns with the lexical distinctions of their respective languages. Although this prediction has been supported by a number of studies investigating the Whorfian hypothesis (see Wolff & Holmes, 2011), other studies have shown striking asymmetries in performance on linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks. Malt et al. (1999) found that speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese differed markedly in how they named a set of common household containers (e.g., bottles, jars, etc.), yet showed remarkable agreement when sorting the objects based on overall similarity. Munnich et al. (2001) observed that English, Japanese, and Korean speakers differed in their naming, but not their memory, of spatial locations. Papafragou et al. (2008) found that English and Greek speakers described motion events differently despite showing similar attentional patterns when viewing the events. Together, these findings suggest that the distinctions picked out by words are not invariably salient at the conceptual level, implying some degree of dissociation between words and conceptual representations. Several factors might account for this word-concept mismatch. Word meanings are shaped, to a much greater degree than conceptual knowledge, by historical forces such as language contact and past speakers’ concerns (Malt, Gennari, & Imai, 2010), and by communicative pressures, such as the need to maximize informativeness and minimize cognitive load (Kemp & Regier, 2012). As a consequence, the words of a language will tend to reflect the language’s history and support efficient communication, but may often fail to capture salient conceptual distinctions – despite the long-standing intuition that they should (cf. Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976). Language is often regarded as a rich source of evidence about the mind. However, a number of findings challenge this position, at least at the level of words: Where languages differ in their lexical distinctions, conceptual differences are not always observed. We ask here how language might serve as a window into the mind despite an apparently loose connection between words and concepts. We propose that prominent conceptual distinctions, though not necessarily captured by individual words, may be revealed by elements of meaning shared by multiple words. Testing this hypothesis in the domain of space, we show that clusters of spatial terms, identified through dimensionality reduction analyses of semantic similarity data, align with conceptual categories spontaneously accessed during the perceptual discrimination of spatial relations. These findings suggest that aspects of semantic structure beyond the level of words may provide considerable insight into the conceptual system. Implications for research on linguistic relativity are discussed. Keywords: language and thought; word meaning; concepts; semantic structure; space; categorical perception. Introduction Many cognitive scientists regard language as a window into the mind (Chomsky, 1975; Lakoff, 1987; Pinker, 2007). Complicating this view, however, is the observation that languages differ dramatically in how they partition the world by name (Malt & Wolff, 2010). Critically, this semantic diversity is not necessarily mirrored by corresponding conceptual diversity: Where languages differ in their lexical distinctions, conceptual differences are not always observed (e.g., Malt et al., 1999; Munnich, Landau, & Dosher, 2001; Papafragou, Hulbert, & Trueswell, 2008). Such findings suggest that, at least at the level of words, language may not be a particularly good window into the mind. In this research, we look beyond individual words to identify other aspects of semantic structure that might prove more tightly connected to the conceptual system. In particular, we propose that prominent conceptual distinctions may be revealed by elements of meaning shared by multiple words. Investigating this hypothesis in the domain of space, we identify clusters of spatial prepositions with similar meanings and assess the extent to which those meanings are spontaneously accessed during the nonlinguistic processing of spatial relations. Our ultimate conclusion will be that language can provide an illuminating window into the mind—if you know where to look. The semantic clusters hypothesis Although the factors outlined above render individual words an unreliable guide to conceptual representations, there may be other ways in which language can provide insight into