Reading focus
Syllabus: How Do We Understand and Use Language?
Use the review's distinctions to make a claim about language precise enough to evaluate. Carry forward the earlier contrast between differences across language groups and changes produced within a task.
A question to consider. How would you distinguish language making a judgment easier from language making that judgment possible at all?
Why this reading
The claim that language affects thought conceals several different hypotheses. Wolff and Holmes separate them by the kind of influence proposed. This makes it possible to ask what a particular experiment supports without treating every result as a verdict on one sweeping claim.
Before you read
Linguistic relativity concerns relationships between language and cognition; determinism is the stronger claim that language fixes the available forms of thought. A task can recruit language even when its response is nonverbal. Distinguish an influence during performance from a lasting consequence of learning or using a language.
Read for
- Translate the review's proposed kinds of influence into distinct predictions. Keep changes in ability separate from changes in accessibility or habitual attention.
- For one example, identify whether the evidence varies language group, verbal activity during a task, or prior experience.
- Ask which alternative explanations a cross-language comparison leaves unresolved and what an interference manipulation adds.
Consider afterwards
- People name two stimuli differently but discriminate them equally accurately at different speeds. Which hypotheses about language and thought remain compatible with that result?
Editorial context
This is a narrative synthesis of evidence available around 2010, not a systematic review of the present literature. Its taxonomy remains useful even where the strength of particular examples is disputed. Evidence that language changes performance does not establish that speakers of another language lack a concept or inhabit an incommensurable perceptual world.