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Evidence for Language-Shaped Conceptual Representations: Bilinguals Converge on Representations Interposed Between Monolinguals’
Poster Session D, Saturday, October 26, 10:30 am - 12:00 pm, Great Hall 3 and 4
Maya Taliaferro1, Esti Blanco-Elorrieta1; 1New York University
Language plays a pivotal role in shaping how we construct and refine concept representations. Through language, we not only label and categorize objects, but we also establish the relationships and hierarchies among them. Importantly, however, different languages have distinct vocabularies that may emphasize certain features of reality while downplaying others. For this reason, direct translations of words across languages may not correspond to isomorphic representations of these concepts. For example, a dish considered a “bowl” in English may not always be mapped to the translational equivalent “wǎn” in Mandarin. Thus, language does not merely label pre-existing concepts, but it also shapes and molds our conceptual space. This has the potential to impact how we perceive, understand, and interact with the world. Bilingual individuals navigate a unique cognitive landscape, as they possess two languages that not only use different labels for the same concepts, but often have distinct sets of conceptual representations. If the relation between language and thought is deterministic, such that the words we use determine how we form and define concepts, then bilinguals would need to develop two independent conceptual spaces that align with the distinctions each language makes (i.e., separate system hypothesis). Alternatively, if words simply highlight certain features but neither determine nor delimit conceptual representations, bilinguals will not have two monolingual systems in a single brain, but rather conceptual representations that are a blend between the two (i.e., shared system hypothesis). To parse between these two possibilities, we use magnetoencephalography (MEG) and a novel representation learning approach to investigate the content of language-independent concepts and how they evolve over time at the millisecond level. 48 monolingual English, 46 monolingual Mandarin and 24 bilingual Mandarin-English speakers performed a two alternative forced choice task (2AFC) to select the correct label for a visual stimulus that belonged to either experimental or control continua. Each continuum consisted of a pair of unambiguous pictures/categories on each end (e.g., a plate and a bowl) and we varied the features that distinguish them in seven steps. Critically, experimental continua contained items that were roughly equivalent across English and Mandarin but change category at a different step. Control continua were categories that overlap perfectly across languages. We analyzed the difference in category crossover steps and the nature of the language (in)dependent conceptual representations as indexed by neural representational similarity analysis of semantic features (e.g., can hold water, has a spout), low-level sensory-level features, and lexical features (frequency, lexical semantics). We found that conceptual representations overlapped for English and Mandarin monolinguals in the control continua, while they significantly diverged in the experimental continua. Critically, for concepts that diverged across languages, bilingual individuals showed representations that were the perfect blend between the two. These results support a theory of concepts where the nature of conceptual representations is heavily influenced by language and confirms that the effect of one language system upon the other in bilingual individuals goes far beyond the lexical system to permeate the semantic level and create conceptual representations interposed between both monolingual groups.
Topic Areas: Multilingualism,