Linguistic relativity Daniel Casasanto

Bodily Relativity: The body-specificity of language and thought

Do people with different kinds of bodies think differently? According to the body-specificity hypothesis (Casasanto 2009), they should. In this paper, I review evidence that rightand left-handers, who perform actions in systematically different ways, use correspondingly different areas of the brain for imagining actions and representing the meanings of action verbs. Beyond the concrete domain o...

The thickness of musical pitch: psychophysical evidence for linguistic relativity.

Do people who speak different languages think differently, even when they are not using language? To find out, we used nonlinguistic psychophysical tasks to compare mental representations of musical pitch in native speakers of Dutch and Farsi. Dutch speakers describe pitches as high (hoog) or low (laag), whereas Farsi speakers describe pitches as thin (nazok) or thick (koloft). Differences in l...

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Whorf? Crosslinguistic Differences in Temporal Language and Thought

The idea that language shapes the way we think, often associated with Benjamin Whorf, has long been decried as not only wrong but also fundamentally wrong-headed. Yet, experimental evidence has reopened debate about the extent to which language influences nonlinguistic cognition, particularly in the domain of time. In this article, I will first analyze an influential argument against the Whorfi...

Virtually accommodating: Speech rate accommodation to a virtual interlocutor

Why do people accommodate to each other’s linguistic behavior? Studies of natural interactions (Giles, Taylor & Bourhis, 1973) suggest that speakers accommodate to achieve interactional goals, influencing what their interlocutor thinks or feels about them. But is this the only reason speakers accommodate? In real-world conversations, interactional motivations are ubiquitous, making it difficult...

Speech Accommodation Without Priming: The Case of Pitch