Abstract
Linguistic relativity theory has received empirical support in domains such as color perception and object categorization. It is unknown, however, whether relations between words idiosyncratic to language impact non-verbal representations and conceptualizations. For instance, would one consider the concepts of horse and sea as related were it not for the existence of the compound seahorse? Here, we investigated such arbitrary conceptual relationships using a non-linguistic picture relatedness task in participants undergoing event-related brain potential recordings. Picture pairs arbitrarily related because of a compound and presented in the compound order elicited N400 amplitudes similar to unrelated pairs. Surprisingly, however, pictures presented in the reverse order (as in the sequence horse–sea) reduced N400 amplitudes significantly, demonstrating the existence of a link in memory between these two concepts otherwise unrelated. These results break new ground in the domain of linguistic relativity by revealing predicted semantic associations driven by lexical relations intrinsic to language.
Highlights
The Whorfian hypothesis that language may influence other cognitive processes has recently become a major topic in psycholinguistics and neuroscience, probably because evidence in this area is directly informative as regards long-standing debates on language encapsulation (Fodor, 1975, 2008; Chomsky, 2000).Over the past two decades, the Whorfian hypothesis has undergone a significant revival
ERPs elicited by pictures related because of the existence of a compound in the lexicon failed to reduce N400 ERP amplitudes, the same pictures presented in the reverse order significantly reduced N400 amplitudes as compared to semantically unrelated ones
Compound and Reversed conditions were indistinguishable on the basis of behavioral data, N400 amplitude was only significantly reduced as compared to unrelated pairs for the latter condition
Summary
The Whorfian hypothesis that language may influence other cognitive processes has recently become a major topic in psycholinguistics and neuroscience, probably because evidence in this area is directly informative as regards long-standing debates on language encapsulation (Fodor, 1975, 2008; Chomsky, 2000).Over the past two decades, the Whorfian hypothesis has undergone a significant revival. The Whorfian hypothesis that language may influence other cognitive processes has recently become a major topic in psycholinguistics and neuroscience, probably because evidence in this area is directly informative as regards long-standing debates on language encapsulation (Fodor, 1975, 2008; Chomsky, 2000). In agreement with early criticism of the hypothesis, a deterministic view of linguistic relativity has been dismissed. Subsequent developments of the hypothesis have lead to a non-deterministic account according to which language influences thought without necessarily determining it. One recent theoretical development is the label-feedback hypothesis (Lupyan, 2012), which proposes that language is highly interconnected with other cognitive processes such as categorization and that it produces transient modulations of on-going neural processing at different functional levels
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