Effects of Language on Visual Perception.

Does language change what we perceive? Does speaking different languages cause us to perceive things differently? We review the behavioral and electrophysiological evidence for the influence of language on perception, with an emphasis on the visual modality. Effects of language on perception can be observed both in higher-level processes such as recognition and in lower-level processes such as discrimination and detection. A consistent finding is that language causes us to perceive in a more categorical way.

Language and the Construction of Time through Space.

Speakers of different languages think about time differently in accordance with the spatial metaphors common in their languages. Furthermore, learning new spatial metaphors in language instills new non-linguistic representations of time, suggesting that language can play a causal role in constructing mental timelines.

How Linguistic Metaphor Scaffolds Reasoning.

Language helps people communicate and think. Precise and accurate language would seem best suited to achieve these goals. But a close look at the way people actually talk reveals an abundance of apparent imprecision in the form of metaphor: ideas are 'light bulbs', crime is a 'virus', and cancer is an 'enemy' in a 'war'.

New Space-Time Metaphors Foster New Nonlinguistic Representations.

What is the role of language in constructing knowledge? In this article, we ask whether learning new relational language can create new ways of thinking. In Experiment 1, we taught English speakers to talk about time using new vertical linguistic metaphors, saying things like "breakfast is above dinner" or "breakfast is below dinner" (depending on condition). In Experiment 2, rather than teaching people new metaphors, we relied on the left-right representations of time that our American college student participants have already internalized through a lifetime of visuospatial experience reading and writing text from left to right.

Semantic Coherence Facilitates Distributional Learning.

Computational models have shown that purely statistical knowledge about words' linguistic contexts is sufficient to learn many properties of words, including syntactic and semantic category. For example, models can infer that "postman" and "mailman" are semantically similar because they have quantitatively similar patterns of association with other words (e.g.

Measuring Effects of Metaphor in a Dynamic Opinion Landscape.

Metaphors pervade discussions of critical issues, making up as much as 10-20% of natural discourse. Recent work has suggested that these conventional and systematic metaphors influence the way people reason about the issues they describe. For instance, previous work has found that people were more likely to want to fight back against a crime beast by increasing the police force but more likely to want to diagnose and treat a crime virus through social reform.

Constructing mental time without visual experience.

Across many cultures, people create spatial representations of time. The direction of mental timelines often follows the direction of writing in a person's language. A new study demonstrates that blind participants (who read with their hands) also show mental timelines that follow reading direction.

Patients with left spatial neglect also neglect the "left side" of time.

Previous research suggests that people construct mental time lines to represent and reason about time. However, is the ability to represent space truly necessary for representing events along a mental time line? Our results are the first to demonstrate that deficits in spatial representation (as a function of left hemispatial neglect) also result in deficits in representing events along the mental time line. Specifically, we show that patients with left hemispatial neglect have difficulty representing events that are associated with the past and, thus, fall to the left on the mental time line.

The immediate and chronic influence of spatio-temporal metaphors on the mental representations of time in english, mandarin, and mandarin-english speakers.

In this paper we examine whether experience with spatial metaphors for time has an influence on people's representation of time. In particular we ask whether spatio-temporal metaphors can have both chronic and immediate effects on temporal thinking. In Study 1, we examine the prevalence of ego-moving representations for time in Mandarin speakers, English speakers, and Mandarin-English (ME) bilinguals.

Natural language metaphors covertly influence reasoning.

Metaphors pervade discussions of social issues like climate change, the economy, and crime. We ask how natural language metaphors shape the way people reason about such social issues. In previous work, we showed that describing crime metaphorically as a beast or a virus, led people to generate different solutions to a city's crime problem.

Spatialization of time in mian.

We examine representations of time among the Mianmin of Papua New Guinea. We begin by describing the patterns of spatial and temporal reference in Mian. Mian uses a system of spatial terms that derive from the orientation and direction of the Hak and Sek rivers and the surrounding landscape.

How linguistic and cultural forces shape conceptions of time: English and Mandarin time in 3D.

In this paper we examine how English and Mandarin speakers think about time, and we test how the patterns of thinking in the two groups relate to patterns in linguistic and cultural experience. In Mandarin, vertical spatial metaphors are used more frequently to talk about time than they are in English; English relies primarily on horizontal terms. We present results from two tasks comparing English and Mandarin speakers' temporal reasoning.

Cross-cultural differences in mental representations of time: evidence from an implicit nonlinguistic task.

Across cultures people construct spatial representations of time. However, the particular spatial layouts created to represent time may differ across cultures. This paper examines whether people automatically access and use culturally specific spatial representations when reasoning about time.

Space and Time in the Child's Mind: Evidence for a Cross-Dimensional Asymmetry.

What is the relationship between space and time in the human mind? Studies in adults show an asymmetric relationship between mental representations of these basic dimensions of experience: Representations of time depend on space more than representations of space depend on time. Here we investigated the relationship between space and time in the developing mind. Native Greek-speaking children watched movies of two animals traveling along parallel paths for different distances or durations and judged the spatial and temporal aspects of these events (e.

Metaphors we think with: the role of metaphor in reasoning.

The way we talk about complex and abstract ideas is suffused with metaphor. In five experiments, we explore how these metaphors influence the way that we reason about complex issues and forage for further information about them. We find that even the subtlest instantiation of a metaphor (via a single word) can have a powerful influence over how people attempt to solve social problems like crime and how they gather information to make "well-informed" decisions.

Who dunnit? Cross-linguistic differences in eye-witness memory.

Does eye-witness memory differ depending on the language one speaks? We examined English and Spanish speakers' descriptions of intentional and accidental events, and their memory for the agents of these events. English and Spanish speakers described intentional events similarly, using mostly agentive language (e.g.

Are things that are hard to physically move also hard to imagine moving?

Are objects that are more difficult to physically manipulate also more difficult to mentally manipulate? In our study, participants interacted with wooden objects modeled after the figures from Shepard and Metzler's (1971) classic mental rotation experiment. One pair of objects was easy to physically rotate while another pair was difficult. They then completed a standard mental rotation task on images of these objects.

Processing unrelated language can change what you see.

When we hear a story, do we naturally imagine the visual scene being described? Do the representations derived in the course of normal language comprehension interact with visual perception broadly? For example, might understanding language change how we interpret visual scenes, even when the visual scenes are unrelated to the linguistic content? In our study, people interpreted an ambiguous image after they had (1) seen real visual motion either upward or downward (Experiment 1), (2) read a story describing physical motion (Experiment 2), or (3) read a story describing abstract motion (Experiment 3). The ambiguous figure could have been seen as a bird flying upward or a different bird flying downward, and the participants were simply asked to click on or draw a worm in the bird's beak. People's interpretations of the ambiguous figure were affected by viewing real motion and by reading literal stories describing physical motion, but not by the abstract motion stories.

Subtle linguistic cues influence perceived blame and financial liability.

When bad things happen, how do we decide who is to blame and how much they should be punished? In the present studies, we examined whether subtly different linguistic descriptions of accidents influence how much people blame and punish those involved. In three studies, participants judged how much people involved in particular accidents should be blamed and how much they should have to pay for the resulting damage. The language used to describe the accidents differed subtly across conditions: Either agentive (transitive) or non-agentive (intransitive) verb forms were used.

Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently?

Time is a fundamental domain of experience. In this paper we ask whether aspects of language and culture affect how people think about this domain. Specifically, we consider whether English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently.

Remembrances of times East: absolute spatial representations of time in an Australian aboriginal community.

How do people think about time? Here we describe representations of time in Pormpuraaw, a remote Australian Aboriginal community. Pormpuraawans' representations of time differ strikingly from all others documented to date. Previously, people have been shown to represent time spatially from left to right or right to left, or from front to back or back to front.

Visual motion aftereffect from understanding motion language.

Do people spontaneously form visual mental images when understanding language, and if so, how truly visual are these representations? We test whether processing linguistic descriptions of motion produces sufficiently vivid mental images to cause direction-selective motion adaptation in the visual system (i.e., cause a motion aftereffect illusion).