Language in Mind: Advances in the Study of Language and Thought (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought ed. by Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow Marilyn Shatz Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and thought. Ed. by Dedre Gentner and Susan Goldin-Meadow. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. 528. ISBN 0262571633. $38. The question of whether and how language influences thought is a venerable one, going back more than 150 years. A spate of recent research projects, conferences, and edited volumes (e.g. Bowerman & Levinson 2001) speaks to renewed interest in the issue that was perhaps most famously voiced by the oft-quoted and often misquoted Benjamin Whorf, who considered both strong (language determines the way we perceive and organize the world) and weak (language exerts a superficial influence) answers to the question. Why the renewed interest, one might ask, when numerous writers with considerable prestige (e.g. Pinker 1994) have labeled much of the research on this issue, at least the earlier work, ‘banal’? The conclusion a reader of Language in mind reaches is that a full understanding of the nature of humans, their development, and the ways they act requires investigation into the influences of language on thinking and speaking in the context of membership in a human society. Language in mind is the latest volume on the topic of language’s influences on thought, and it is an especially useful one. Not only does it offer summaries of recent research on the issue, but rather than presenting a single perspective, it offers a range of theoretical stances and arguments concerning the relative influences of language on thought. The resulting volume might have ended up a hodge-podge, but it does not. Because the editors include an introductory chapter and organize the remaining chapters into four sections, and because chapter authors refer to and respond to each other’s arguments, the reader can get a reasonably comprehensive overview of the state-of-the-art experimental research, an understanding of the theoretical meta-theories grounding such research, and an awareness of the unresolved issues awaiting future efforts at more insight. In the introductory chapter, the editors recognize the lack of precision troubling the general question of language’s influence on thought, and they propose three distinctions to help clarify the possible kinds of relations: language as lens, language as tool kit, and language as category maker. The first refers to a relatively strong view propounding a deep influence for language on the very way we perceive the world, with such an influence carried largely by the grammatical structure of the language. The second, focusing more on lexical differences among languages, offers a view of language as an enhancer or expander of cognitive abilities, and the third deals specifically with the idea that a language’s semantics guides the categories children acquire during cognitive-linguistic development. Within each of these distinctions, of course, there are still more questions that can be asked. For example, when children form categories, does language [End Page 174] primarily function to select from and narrow prelinguistic information, or do the categories truly emerge from linguistic experience? If the former, do adults still have flexible potential, however overlaid with language, or is the influence of language irreversible? Connecting across the distinctions are other questions, for example, how do the findings on linguistic influences on category development affect the issues of language as lens or as tool kit? Across the chapters, many such important questions are addressed, if not resolved. While recognizing such connections, the editors use their distinctions, along with a section on position statements, to organize the sixteen chapters in the book. Interdisciplinary representation and crosslinguistic perspectives add to the volume’s currency. Among the more than two dozen authors who contributed to the volume are cognitive and developmental psychologists, psycholinguists, and anthropologists, many of the best-known researchers in the field of language and thought among them. Crosslinguistic data regularly form the basis for discussion, with a wide variety of languages such as Korean, Mandarin, Tzeltal, Yucatec Maya, and English represented. Indeed, the importance of and need for crosslinguistic research to address language-thought issues are recognized throughout the book. Despite the represented range...