{"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/"}]}