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{
    "pk": 26438,
    "title": "A computational investigation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis:The case of spatial relations",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Investigations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis often ask whetherthere is a difference in the non-linguistic behavior of speak-ers of two languages, generally without modeling the underly-ing process. Such an approach leaves underexplored the rela-tive contributions of language and universal aspects of cogni-tion, and how those contributions differ across languages. Weexplore the naming and non-linguistic pile-sorting of spatialscenes across speakers of five languages via a computationalmodel grounded in an influential proposal: that language willaffect cognition when non-linguistic information is uncertain.We report two findings. First, native language plays a smallbut significant role in predicting spatial similarity judgmentsacross languages, consistent with earlier findings. Second, thesize of the native-language role varies systematically, such thatfiner-grained semantic systems appear to shape similarity judg-ments more than coarser-grained systems do. These findingscapture the tradeoff between language-specific and universalforces in cognition, and how that tradeoff varies across lan-guages.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Linguistic relativity; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; se-mantic universals; name strategy; categorization; spatial rela-tions; computational models."
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3vj0k88n",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Christine",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Tseng",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "California Institute of Technology, Pasadena",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Alexandra",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Carstensen",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Terry",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Regier",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Yang",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Xu",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University of California, Berkeley",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2016-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26438/galley/16074/download/"
        }
    ]
}