The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts

Abstract

Abstract The influence of language and culture has been investigated across different research disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural psychology, but such research all tends to ask whether language (or culture) influences cognition in general, without clearly specifying what is meant by "language" or "culture." This chapter proposes an alternative approach, whose aim is to specify a complex interplay among various factors—including universal cognitive constraints, perceptual affordances provided from the world, task-specific constraints, language-specific biases, and culture-specific cognitive styles—to account for people's behavior in a given cognitive task and the developmental trajectory of that behavior. To establish this point, four research programs examining the roles of language and culture in terms of construal and organization of objects, relations among objects, and actions are reviewed.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 42 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.