1 Speaking vs . Thinking about Objects and Actions

A strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis is that the influence of language on thought is obligatory or at least habitual; that is, thought is always, or under most circumstances, guided by language. We argue, in contrast, that at the lexical level, language and thought need not closely or commonly mirror each other. Naming – of objects, events, or other entities -is a communicative process that is sensitive to pressures such as a language’s history and the particular history of speaker and addressee. These influences are not relevant to a non-linguistic conceptual system and to the various processes that may draw on it. We suggest that, as a result, the categories defined by the names given to entities and those defined by purely conceptual clusters may diverge. We present results indicating that linguistic categories (sets of objects called by the same name) are not isomorphic to groupings emerging from a conceptual task for artifacts in the domain of containers. We found that the linguistic categories for 60 common containers varied across speakers of English, Spanish, and Chinese. In contrast, the ways that speakers clustered the objects by similarity were substantially the same. We also present results indicating that verbs of motion show a similar pattern when encoding of actions is non-linguistic. Speakers of English and Spanish showed the same pattern of similarity judgments and confusions in memory for previously viewed action clips despite different naming patterns in their languages. We did find a linguistic effect in the similarity task after verbal encoding, an effect that conformed to language-specific patterns. Results from these two studies, along with consideration of the nature of naming and non-linguistic conceptual tasks, suggest that (1) all domains will exhibit variability in linguistic categorization across cultures; (2) conceptual performance is not necessarily closely tied to linguistic categories and may be universal; (3)