Languages: Europe puts its money where its mouth is.
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Europe↗
Biomedical subjects
Stephen C Levinson
Publications and source records attributed to Stephen C Levinson.
Structural phylogenetics and the reconstruction of ancient language history.
The contribution of language history to the study of the early dispersals of modern humans throughout the Old World has been limited by the shallow time depth (about 8000 +/- 2000 years) of current linguistic methods. Here it is shown that the application of biological cladistic methods, not to vocabulary (as has been previously tried) but to language structure (sound systems and grammar), may extend the time depths at which language data can be used. The method was tested against well-understood families of Oceanic Austronesian languages, then applied to the Papuan languages of Island Melanesia, a group of hitherto unrelatable isolates. Papuan languages show an archipelago-based phylogenetic signal that is consistent with the current geographical distribution of languages. The most plausible hypothesis to explain this result is the divergence of the Papuan languages from a common ancestral stock, as part of late Pleistocene dispersals.
Asia↗
Can language restructure cognition? The case for space.
Frames of reference are coordinate systems used to compute and specify the location of objects with respect to other objects. These have long been thought of as innate concepts, built into our neurocognition. However, recent work shows that the use of such frames in language, cognition and gesture varies cross-culturally, and that children can acquire different systems with comparable ease. We argue that language can play a significant role in structuring, or restructuring, a domain as fundamental as spatial cognition. This suggests we need to rethink the relation between the neurocognitive underpinnings of spatial cognition and the concepts we use in everyday thinking, and, more generally, to work out how to account for cross-cultural cognitive diversity in core cognitive domains.
Adult↗
Returning the tables: language affects spatial reasoning.
Li and Gleitman (Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning. Cognition, in press) seek to undermine a large-scale cross-cultural comparison of spatial language and cognition which claims to have demonstrated that language and conceptual coding in the spatial domain covary (see, for example, Space in language and cognition: explorations in linguistic diversity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, in press; Language 74 (1998) 557): the most plausible interpretation is that different languages induce distinct conceptual codings. Arguing against this, Li and Gleitman attempt to show that in an American student population they can obtain any of the relevant conceptual codings just by varying spatial cues, holding language constant. They then argue that our findings are better interpreted in terms of ecologically-induced distinct cognitive styles reflected in language. Linguistic coding, they argue, has no causal effects on non-linguistic thinking--it simply reflects antecedently existing conceptual distinctions. We here show that Li and Gleitman did not make a crucial distinction between frames of spatial reference relevant to our line of research. We report a series of experiments designed to show that they have, as a consequence, misinterpreted the results of their own experiments, which are in fact in line with our hypothesis. Their attempts to reinterpret the large cross-cultural study, and to enlist support from animal and infant studies, fail for the same reasons. We further try to discern exactly what theory drives their presumption that language can have no cognitive efficacy, and conclude that their position is undermined by a wide range of considerations.
Cognition↗