Discussion group: assessing the language-thought relationship
Thursday, November 14, 2024, 3:00 - 4:30 pm EST America/New_York
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Organized by: William Matchin Contact William
Humans are very weird animals, both in terms of our communicative expressiveness as well as our ability to plan, solve problems, formulate hypotheses, and in general to think in unusual ways. Some researchers have asked whether particular properties of specific languages affects non-linguistic cognition (i.e., some version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), for example whether grammatical gender of words changes the conceptualization of the objects named by those words. However, an older and arguably more fundamental question concerns the extent to which the human capacity for thought is wrapped up in the faculty of language in general, regardless of the specific grammatical properties of specific languages. Some researchers have attempted to address this question using functional neuroimaging and/or studies of people with brain disorders. However, operationalizing different aspects of creative hypothesis-formation and problem solving is extremely difficult. This discussion group will review some of this literature and attempt to sketch out well-formed ways of addressing this question using modern neuroscience methods.
Maximum attendees: 20
Attendees: Jeremy Yeaton, Brielle Stark, Alexander Swiderski, Ashlie Pankonin, Chaleece Sandberg