2011 Scientific American
Lera Boroditsky is an assistant professor of cognitive psychology at
Stanford University and editor in chief of Frontiers in Cultural Psychology.
Her lab conducts research around the world, focusing on mental
representation and the effects of language on cognition.
COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
How Language
Shapes Thought
The languages we speak affect our perceptions of the world
By Lera Boroditsky
am standing next to a five-year old girl in pormpuraaw, a small The notion that different languages may impart different cog-
Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York in nitive skills goes back centuries. Since the 1930s it has become
northern Australia. When I ask her to point north, she points associated with American linguists Edward Sapir and Benja-
precisely and without hesitation. My compass says she is right. min Lee Whorf, who studied how languages vary and proposed
Later, back in a lecture hall at Stanford University, I make the ways that speakers of different tongues may think differently.
same request of an audience of distinguished scholars win- Although their ideas met with much excitement early on, there
Iners of science medals and genius prizes. Some of them have was one small problem: a near complete lack of evidence to
come to this very room to hear lectures for more than 40 years. I support their claims. By the 1970s many scientists had become
ask them to close their eyes (so they don t cheat) and point north. disenchanted with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it was all
Many refuse; they do not know the answer. Those who do point but abandoned as a new set of theories claiming that language
take a while to think about it and then aim in all possible direc- and thought are universal muscled onto the scene. But now, de-
tions. I have repeated this exercise at Harvard and Princeton and cades later, a solid body of empirical evidence showing how lan-
in Moscow, London and Beijing, always with the same results. guages shape thinking has finally emerged. The evidence over-
A five-year-old in one culture can do something with ease turns the long-standing dogma about universality and yields
that eminent scientists in other cultures struggle with. This is a fascinating insights into the origins of knowledge and the con-
big difference in cognitive ability. What could explain it? The struction of reality. The results have important implications for
surprising answer, it turns out, may be language. law, politics and education.
IN BRIEF
People communicate using a multitude er different languages might impart dif- cating that one s mother tongue does The latest findings also hint that lan-
of languages that vary considerably in ferent cognitive abilities. indeed mold the way one thinks about guage is part and parcel of many more
the information they convey. In recent years empirical evidence for many aspects of the world, including aspects of thought than scientists had
Scholars have long wondered wheth- this causal relation has emerged, indi- space and time. previously realized.
Illustration by Tom Whalen February 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 63
2011 Scientific American
Speakers
UNDER THE INFLUENCE We tested each person twice, each time fac-
of different
around the world people communicate with ing in a different cardinal direction. English
languages differ
one another using a dazzling array of languag- speakers given this task will arrange the
es 7,000 or so all told and each language re- cards so that time proceeds from left to right.
in how well they
quires very different things from its speakers. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the
can remember
For example, suppose I want to tell you that I cards from right to left. This shows that writ-
who did
saw Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. In Mian, a ing direction in a language influences how we
what.
language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the verb organize time. The Kuuk Thaayorre, however,
I used would reveal whether the event happened did not routinely arrange the cards from left to
just now, yesterday or in the distant past, whereas in right or right to left. They arranged them from
Indonesian, the verb wouldn t even give away whether it had al- east to west. That is, when they were seated facing
ready happened or was still coming up. In Russian, the verb south, the cards went left to right. When they faced
would reveal my gender. In Mandarin, I would have to specify north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced
whether the titular uncle is maternal or paternal and whether he east, the cards came toward the body, and so on. We never told
is related by blood or marriage, because there are different words anyone which direction they were facing the Kuuk Thaayorre
for all these different types of uncles and then some (he happens knew that already and spontaneously used this spatial orienta-
to be a mother s brother, as the Chinese translation clearly states). tion to construct their representations of time.
And in Pirahć, a language spoken in the Amazon, I couldn t say Representations of time vary in many other ways around the
42nd, because there are no words for exact numbers, just words world. For example, English speakers consider the future to be
for few and many. ahead and the past behind. In 2010 Lynden Miles of the Uni-
Languages differ from one another in innumerable ways, but versity of Aberdeen in Scotland and his colleagues discovered
just because people talk differently does not necessarily mean that English speakers unconsciously sway their bodies forward
they think differently. How can we tell whether speakers of when thinking about the future and back when thinking about
Mian, Russian, Indonesian, Mandarin or Pirahć actually end up the past. But in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes, the
attending to, remembering and reasoning about the world in past is said to be in front and the future behind. And the Aymara
different ways because of the languages they speak? Research in speakers body language matches their way of talking: in 2006
my lab and in many others has been uncovering how language Raphael Nśńez of U.C.S.D. and Eve Sweetser of U.C. Berkeley
shapes even the most fundamental dimensions of human expe- found that Aymara gesture in front of them when talking about
rience: space, time, causality and relationships to others. the past and behind them when discussing the future.
Let us return to Pormpuraaw. Unlike English, the Kuuk
Thaayorre language spoken in Pormpuraaw does not use rela- REMEMBERING WHODUNIT
tive spatial terms such as left and right. Rather Kuuk Thaayorre speakers of different languages also differ in how they describe
speakers talk in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, events and, as a result, how well they can remember who did
south, east, west, and so forth). Of course, in English we also use what. All events, even split-second accidents, are complicated and
cardinal direction terms but only for large spatial scales. We require us to construe and interpret what happened. Take, for ex-
would not say, for example, They set the salad forks southeast ample, former vice president Dick Cheney s quail-hunting acci-
of the dinner forks the philistines! But in Kuuk Thaayorre dent, in which he accidentally shot Harry Whittington. One could
cardinal directions are used at all scales. This means one ends say that Cheney shot Whittington (wherein Cheney is the direct
up saying things like the cup is southeast of the plate or the cause), or Whittington got shot by Cheney (distancing Cheney
boy standing to the south of Mary is my brother. In Porm- from the outcome), or Whittington got peppered pretty good
puraaw, one must always stay oriented, just to be able to speak (leaving Cheney out altogether). Cheney himself said Ultimate-
properly. ly I m the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the round that hit
Moreover, groundbreaking work conducted by Stephen C. Harry, interposing a long chain of events between himself and
Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the outcome. President George Bush s take he heard a bird
Nijmegen, the Netherlands, and John B. Haviland of the Universi- flush, and he turned and pulled the trigger and saw his friend get
ty of California, San Diego, over the past two decades has demon- wounded was an even more masterful exculpation, transform-
strated that people who speak languages that rely on absolute di- ing Cheney from agent to mere witness in less than a sentence.
rections are remarkably good at keeping track of where they are, The American public is rarely impressed with such linguistic
even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. wiggling because nonagentive language sounds evasive in Eng-
They do this better than folks who live in the same environments lish, the province of guilt-shirking children and politicians. Eng-
but do not speak such languages and in fact better than scien- lish speakers tend to phrase things in terms of people doing
tists thought humans ever could. The requirements of their lan- things, preferring transitive constructions like John broke the
guages enforce and train this cognitive prowess. vase even for accidents. Speakers of Japanese or Spanish, in con-
People who think differently about space are also likely to trast, are less likely to mention the agent when describing an ac-
think differently about time. For example, my colleague Alice cidental event. In Spanish one might say Se rompió el florero,
Gaby of the University of California, Berkeley, and I gave Kuuk which translates to the vase broke or the vase broke itself.
Thaayorre speakers sets of pictures that showed temporal prog- My student Caitlin M. Fausey and I have found that such lin-
ressions a man aging, a crocodile growing, a banana being eat- guistic differences influence how people construe what hap-
en. We then asked them to arrange the shuffled photographs on pened and have consequences for eyewitness memory. In our
the ground to indicate the correct temporal order. studies, published in 2010, speakers of English, Spanish and
64 Scientific American, February 2011
2011 Scientific American
Japanese watched videos of two guys popping balloons, break- vard and another by Shai Danziger and his colleagues at Ben-Gu-
ing eggs and spilling drinks either intentionally or accidentally. rion University of the Negev in Israel, looked at Arabic-French bi-
Later we gave them a surprise memory test. For each event they linguals in Morocco, Spanish-English bilinguals in the U.S. and
had witnessed, they had to say which guy did it, just like in a po- Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals in Israel, in each case testing the par-
lice line-up. Another group of English, Spanish and Japanese ticipants implicit biases. For example, Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals
speakers described the same events. When we looked at the were asked to quickly press buttons in response to words under
memory data, we found exactly the differences in eyewitness various conditions. In one condition if they saw a Jewish name
memory predicted by patterns in language. Speakers of all three like Yair or a positive trait like good or strong, they were in-
languages described intentional events agentively, saying things structed to press M, ; if they saw an Arab name like Ahmed or
such as He popped the balloon, and all three groups remem- a negative trait like mean or weak, they were told to press
bered who did these intentional actions equally well. When it X. In another condition the pairing was reversed so that Jewish
came to accidents, however, interesting differences emerged. names and negative traits shared a response key, and Arab names
Spanish and Japanese speakers were less likely to describe the and positive traits shared a response key. The researchers mea-
accidents agentively than were English speakers, and they cor- sured how quickly subjects were able to respond under the two
respondingly remembered who did it less well than English conditions. This task has been widely used to measure involun-
speakers did. This was not because they had poorer memory tary or automatic biases how naturally things such as positive
overall they remembered the agents of intentional events (for traits and ethnic groups seem to go together in people s minds.
which their languages would naturally mention the agent) just Surprisingly, the investigators found big shifts in these invol-
as well as English speakers did. untary automatic biases in bilinguals depending on the language
Not only do languages influence what we remember, but the in which they were tested. The Arabic-Hebrew bilinguals, for
structures of languages can make it easier or harder for us to learn their part, showed more positive implicit attitudes toward Jews
new things. For instance, because the number words in some lan- when tested in Hebrew than when tested in Arabic.
guages reveal the underlying base-10 structure more transparent- Language also appears to be involved in many more aspects
ly than do the number words in English (there are no troublesome of our mental lives than scientists had previously supposed. Peo-
teens like 11 or 13 in Mandarin, for instance), kids learning those ple rely on language even when doing simple things like distin-
languages are able to learn the base-10 insight sooner. And de- guishing patches of color, counting dots on a screen or orienting
pending on how many syllables the number words have, it will be in a small room: my colleagues and I have found that limiting
easier or harder to keep a phone number in mind or to do mental people s ability to access their language faculties fluently by
calculation. Language can even affect how quickly children figure giving them a competing demanding verbal task such as repeat-
out whether they are male or female. In 1983 Alexander ing a news report, for instance impairs their ability
ADDITIONAL
Guiora of the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to perform these tasks. This means that the catego-
RESOURCES
compared three groups of kids growing up with He- ries and distinctions that exist in particular languag-
ScientificAmerican.com/
brew, English or Finnish as their native language. He- es are meddling in our mental lives very broadly.
feb2011/language
brew marks gender prolifically (even the word you is What researchers have been calling thinking this
different depending on gender), Finnish has no gender marking whole time actually appears to be a collection of both linguistic
and English is somewhere in between. Accordingly, children grow- and nonlinguistic processes. As a result, there may not be a lot
ing up in a Hebrew-speaking environment figure out their own of adult human thinking where language does not play a role.
gender about a year earlier than Finnish-speaking children; Eng- A hallmark feature of human intelligence is its adaptability,
lish-speaking kids fall in the middle. the ability to invent and rearrange conceptions of the world to
suit changing goals and environments. One consequence of this
WHAT SHAPES WHAT? flexibility is the great diversity of languages that have emerged
These are just some of the many fascinating findings of around the globe. Each provides its own cognitive toolkit and
cross-linguistic differences in cognition. But how do we know encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over
whether differences in language create differences in thought, thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of per-
or the other way around? The answer, it turns out, is both the ceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an in-
way we think influences the way we speak, but the influence valuable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Re-
also goes the other way. The past decade has seen a host of in- search into how the languages we speak shape the way we think
genious demonstrations establishing that language indeed is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and
plays a causal role in shaping cognition. Studies have shown construct reality and how we got to be as smart and sophisticat-
that changing how people talk changes how they think. Teach- ed as we are. And this insight, in turn, helps us understand the
ing people new color words, for instance, changes their ability very essence of what makes us human.
to discriminate colors. And teaching people a new way of talk-
MORE TO EXPLORE
ing about time gives them a new way of thinking about it.
Another way to get at this question is to study people who are
Language Changes Implicit Associations between Ethnic Groups and Evaluation in Bilin-
guals. Shai Danziger and Robert Ward in Psychological Science, Vol. 21, No. 6, pages 799 800;
fluent in two languages. Studies have shown that bilinguals
June 2010.
change how they see the world depending on which language
Constructing Agency: The Role of Language. Caitlin M. Fausey et al. in Frontiers in Cultural
they are speaking. Two sets of findings published in 2010 demon-
Psychology, Vol. 1, Article 162. Published online October 15, 2010.
strate that even something as fundamental as who you like and
Remembrances of Times East: Absolute Spatial Representations of Time in an Australian
do not like depends on the language in which you are asked. The
Aboriginal Community. Lera Boroditsky and Alice Gaby in Psychological Science, Vol. 21,
studies, one by Oludamini Ogunnaike and his colleagues at Har- No. 11, pages 1635 1639; November 2010.
February 2011, ScientificAmerican.com 65
2011 Scientific American
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