Culture, Language, and Thought

Mutsumi Imai
Keio University, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies

Junko Kanero
Sabancı University, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Takahiko Masuda
University of Alberta, Department of Psychology

Summary:
The relations among language, culture, and thought are complex. The empirical evidence
from diverse domains suggests that culture affects language, language affects thought, and
universally shared perception and cognition constrain the structure of language. Although
neither language nor culture determines thought, both seem to highlight certain aspects of the
world, with stronger influence when there are no clear perceptible categories. Research must
delve into how language, culture, perception, and cognition interact with one another across
different domains.

Keywords: language and thought, Whorfian hypothesis, language, culture, cognition,

psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, cultural psychology
 Overarching Questions
Language divides the continuous world and human experiences into discrete
categories. These linguistic categories, created both by words and by grammar, are diverse
across different languages. A number of important questions arise here. To what extent are
linguistic categories common for different languages of the world, despite their apparent
diversity? Are there factors that constrain the linguistic division of the world?
We can also flip the question and ask: To what degree is thought shaped by language?
This question has often been labeled as “the Whorfian hypothesis,” named after the American
linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. According to Whorf, language determines, or at least
influences, thought, and researchers investigating this thesis ask whether speakers of different
languages think differently, particularly in perceptual and cognitive activities that do not
seem to recruit language. In addition, the Whorfian hypothesis has been investigated in light
of whether and how language may change children’s “thought.”
One might also wish to learn the relation between language and thought not only at
the level of individuals but also at the level of culture. The relations among language, culture,
and thought can be investigated in various ways. We may ask, for example: To what extent
does language reflect a particular value or worldview of the culture within which the given
language is spoken? Does culture affect the collective thought of people without the
mediation of language? Are there cases in which the influence of culture and influence of
language are independent of, or in conflict with, each other?

Introduction
When we think about how language or culture influences thought, we generally
consider how differences in language and culture lead to differences in thought. However, the
relations among culture, language, and thought can also be considered from the other
direction, in terms of how the structure of “language” (as a collective noun referring to all
languages) is constrained by our universally shared perception or conceptualization. In this
article, we explore the relations among culture, language, and thought not only in the former,
typical approach but also from the latter angle.
The first section explores language in relation to thought and culture by asking to
what degree language is structured or constrained by the universal “thought” as well as
cultures across the globe. The second section discusses the relation from the other direction—
whether language shapes thought, based on both cross-linguistic and developmental
approaches.
The final section briefly discusses how culture might affect thought, reviewing the
literature of cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural psychology. This
exploration also discusses the question of whether it is language or culture that affects
thought more prominently. Before starting our exploration, however, we should first specify
how “language,” “culture,” and “thought” are defined in this article.

What Is Language?
The term “language” has been used to denote a broad range of meanings in the
language and thought debate. Any feature of language, such as phonetic, lexical, and
grammatical characteristics, can be a topic of investigation pertaining to the relation between
language and thought. However, researchers who investigate the Whorfian hypothesis within
the tradition of cognitive psychology or psycholinguistics generally focus on the influence of
lexical or grammatical categories on perception, categorization, and knowledge
representation (Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003; Gumperz & Levinson, 1996; Malt &
Wolff, 2010, for state-of-art reviews).
In contrast, researchers of cultural psychology would consider culturally unique
epistemologies and discourses as a higher level of linguistic phenomena (Chiu, Hsieh, Kao, &
Lee, 2007; Dehghani et al., 2013; Imai & Masuda, 2013; Kashima, 2009; Kashima, Peters, &
Whelan, 2008; Kitayama, Markus, Matsumoto, & Norasakkunkit, 1997). Here, “language” is
treated as a collection of narratives that reflect culture-specific value systems and
epistemologies, and it is often discussed at the level of discourse (Ambady, Koo, Lee, &
Rosenthal, 1996; Chiu, Leung, & Kwan, 2010; Masuda & Yamagishi, 2010; Miller, Fung, &
Koven, 2010; Senzaki, Masuda, & Ishii, 2014).

What Is Culture?
The influence of “culture” on language has also been approached differently by
cognitive psychologists, cognitive anthropologists, and cultural psychologists. Although there
is no well- known, shared definition of culture in cognitive psychology, cognitive
psychologists of language and thought research generally discuss specific features of cultural
communities such as living situation (e.g., rural vs. urban) and ecological contexts and
subsistence (e.g., farming vs. hunter-gathering; Majid, Bowerman, Kita, Haun, & Levinson,
2004). Cognitive anthropology may consider more features because culture is a large pool of
information, or “programs,” about any actions and understandings that are passed along from
generation to generation (D’Andrade, 1981).
In contrast, cultural psychologists within the tradition of social psychology treat
culture as the intersubjective reality rather than the external, ecological context (Geertz, 1973;
Miller, 1999). Cultural psychologists for the past three decades have developed theoretical
frameworks to characterize people in light of core meaning systems shared in each society.
One prominent theoretical point is that people in different cultures have different ways of
viewing the world, and each worldview is substantiated in the ways they categorize
themselves, others, objects, and the world (Masuda, 2017; see Masuda, Li, Russell, & Lee,
2019, for review). A well- accepted theory contrasts two social orientation models: an
independent social orientation and an interdependent social orientation. Those who live in a
culture where independent social orientation is dominant tend to view themselves as
independent of other social members and hold cognitive styles that emphasize self-direction,
autonomy, and self- expression. In contrast, those who live in a culture where interdependent
social orientation is dominant tend to view themselves as socially embedded within a web of
dense relationships among social members; they hold cognitive styles that emphasize
harmony, relatedness, and connection (Kitayama & Uskul, 2011; Kitayama, Varnum, &
Salvador, 2019; Markus & Kitayama, 1991, 2010; Miyamoto, 2013; Nisbett, 2003; Varnum,
Grossmann, Kitayama, & Nisbett, 2010). We will explore how these different ways of
viewing “culture” are reflected in language use and narrative construction, and how language
and culture together or separately affect thought in the section “How Do Culture and
Language Affect Thought?”

What Is Thought?
As in the cases of language and culture, there is no single answer to the question of
what “thought” is. Researchers often use the term “thought” to refer to conceptual
representation, but they also use the term to mean a wide range of functions, such as
perception, reasoning, and learning. Various measures have been used to index “thought,”
including category making, similarity judgments, and response latency. Recently,
neurophysiological data have been used in cognitive psychology to unravel subtle differences
in “thought” that cannot be detected behaviorally (e.g., Thierry, Athanasopoulos, Wiggett,
Dering, & Kuipers, 2009). Cultural psychologists have also begun to employ methodologies
commonly used in cognitive psychology and neuroscience (Chee, Zheng, Goh, Park, &
Sutton, 2011; Goto, Ando, Huang, Yee, & Lewis, 2010; Han, Northoff, Vogeley, Waxler,
Kitayama, & Varnum, 2013; Na & Kitayama, 2011).

Influence of Thought and Culture on Language

Influence of Perception on the Lexicon

Are there forces that structure the lexicon across culturally unrelated languages?
Previous research in cognitive anthropology and psychology suggests that, although
superordinate- category labels vary across cultures, the lexical structures of the basic-level
labels for natural kind objects are strikingly consistent across widely different environments
and living styles, from people living in indigenous cultures without much modern technology
to people living in urban, industrialized environments (Malt, 1995; Rosch, 1978; Rosch,
Mervis, Gray, Jonson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976). There seem to be constraints on labeling
natural objects, reflecting perceptual or conceptual gaps that are detectable to everyone
regardless of living environment or other culture experiences (Berlin, 1992; Hunn, 1975;
Medin, Lynch, Coley, & Atran, 1997; see Malt, 1995, for a review).
The naming of colors is another good example as it appears to differ vastly across
languages. Whereas the Dani language in Papa New Guinea does not have specific terms to
refer to hues (except the terms vaguely refer to “dark/black” and “light/white”), Russian has
12 basic color terms (e.g., Berlin & Kay, 1969). Even in such diverse domains, cross-cultural
consistency has been observed. Berlin and Kay (1969) argued that the naming of colors
follows a systematic pattern in which the number of color terms predicts which specific hues
receive labels. For example, all languages with only two color terms have “black” and
“white” and all languages with three color terms additionally label “red.” More recently,
following the proposal by Jameson and D’Andrade (1997), Regier, Kay, and Khetarpal
(2007) analyzed the color-naming data by speakers of 110 different languages, and reported
that the assignment of color categories maximizes perceived similarity within categories
while minimizing similarity across categories. Although there is room for a linguistic
convention to modify the assignment, the color-naming pattern seems to follow a
perceptually optimal partitioning of color space at least to some degree.
Culture-independent constraints may be found in the verb lexicon as well. The
domain of human locomotion can provide such insights. Languages differ in how they divide
the walking- running continuum by applying different verbs for the running or walking
motions done in different speed. Barbara Malt and colleagues (Malt et al., 2008) had adult
speakers of English, Spanish, Dutch, and Japanese produce words to describe 24 locomotive
actions that differed in speed. The Dutch speakers distinguished the motions using up to
seven (monolexemic) verbs, whereas the Japanese speakers produced only two verbs to
describe the same spectrum. The Spanish and English speakers were in the middle,
distinguishing the motions with three and four verbs, respectively. Thus, the four languages
differ in how finely they divide the continuum of locomotion. Strikingly, however, speakers
of all four languages agreed on the transition point from walking to running: English,
Spanish, and Dutch speakers changed from one verb to another at the same point that
Japanese speakers shifted from aruku (to walk) to hashiru (to run). There appeared to be a
salient perceptual gap along the continuously changing motion, and all (or most) languages
would respond to this gap in their linguistic categories. However, such strong constraints are
not abundant in the lexicon. When the team led by Malt conducted another study with a
broader range of natural locomotion that differed not only in speed but also in manner (e.g.,
marching, skipping; Malt et al., 2014), there was no strong common pattern across the four
languages in the ways they were lexicalized.
 The actions denoted by “carrying” and “holding” in English are another example of
cross- linguistic differences in the labeling of actions. English does not seem to care about
how the object is held by an actor, putting all actions of supporting an object by the hands or
other parts of the body (e.g., shoulder, head) in one lexical category, distinguishing actions
only in light of whether the actor is moving (carrying) or not (holding). Although moving and
nonmoving is a salient perceptual contrast, this perceptual gap does not always play a role in
the lexicalization patterns in many languages. For example, languages like Chinese, Japanese,
and Korean divide this domain much more finely by the manner of hand shape or by the body
part that supports the object (Saji et al., 2011; Saji & Imai, 2013), while ignoring the
movement. Likewise, in the domain of clothing verbs, English strictly distinguishes actions
of putting things on the body and the state of wearing things, but the verb system in many
languages does not use this feature.
Thus, although the biophysical distinction between walking and running may invite a
fairly strong lexical distinction which a great majority of languages in the world would follow
(Malt et al., 2008), it is generally difficult to foresee what perceptual features are codified
into the lexicon for lexical distinction. Nevertheless, the idea of typological tendencies has
been suggested by many researchers (Goddard, 2001; Goddard & Wierzbicka, 2014;
Greenberg, Ferguson, & Moravcsik, 1978; Talmy, 2000, Von Fintel & Matthewson, 2008;
Wierzbicka, 1996; Zaefferer, 1991).
Another important angle from which to consider the relation between perception and
language is to compare perceptual accessibility and lexical codability. It has been noted that
humans rely on vision, audition, and motion perception more strongly than other modalities
such as haptic, olfactory, or gustatory perception. Hence researchers (in the WIERD—
Western, Industrial, Educated, Rich and Domestic—culture) have assumed that experience of
visual perception is more dominant in language than that of touch, smell, or taste. Words
denoting odor as a primary sense are particularly sparse in many languages in Western
cultures, and olfactory sensation is expressed only via metaphorical extension of sensation in
another modality (e.g., taste or tactile words such as sweet, soft) or as a simile of the source
object (e.g., like the smell of pear).
Majid and colleagues challenged this view. They pointed out that once languages
outside of Western or Westernized society are considered, there are languages, such as Jahai
(Majid & Brurenhult, 2014) and Maniq (Wnuk & Majid, 2014), that have an extensive
lexicon of olfaction, where the sense of smell is lexicalized in abstract categories, without
alluding to the source object. Furthermore, Majid and Kruspe (2018) demonstrated that only
hunter- gatherers show ease in naming odor, suggesting that subsistence is the most likely
factor to contribute to the ease of access to odor labels. It is important for future research to
examine how lexicon of different perceptual modules besides visual modality is constrained,
and in so doing, researchers need to move beyond languages spoken in Western or
Westernized cultures.

Influence of Culture on Lexical Categories

The lexicon of a language seems to contain items that reflect a culture’s value
systems: Finer lexical distinctions tend to be made for things that are important to the culture.
The Japanese language has three different linguistic categories about rice: “kome (rice
grain),” “ine (rice crops),” and “gohan (cooked rice).” A single species of Japanese fish is
named differently depending on maturity: “mojako (baby amberjack),” “hamachi (young
amberjack)” and “buri (fully mature amberjack).” Turkish makes a similar distinction among
bluefish at different levels of maturity, while English distinguishes between sheep and lamb.
The Chinese language makes very fine distinctions for kinship terms. In Mongolian, although
there are many names for animals such as horse, sheep, cow, camel, and goat, the words
regarding fish are limited. Further, Native American languages tend to have much more
sophisticated lists of vocabularies about trees (e.g., Medin, Ojalehto, Waxman, & Bang,
2015). Majid and Kruspe (2018) suggests that the presence of an elaborate lexicon of odor is
linked to cultural importance—here, both in light of subsistence and traditional values and
beliefs rooted in mythologies.
From a cultural psychology approach, if a society values an interdependent social
style, discourse may be less agent-oriented, specifying the agent of the sentence and blurring
the boundary between speakers and listeners. Conversely, if the society values an
independent social style, discourse may be more agent-oriented, clearly identifying who did
what. One linguistic characteristic that reflects this cultural difference may be the dropping of
pronouns that specify agents in the scenes described. Kashima and Kashima (1998)
investigated the relationship between the level of individualism and the pragmatic leniency of
the pronoun drop across 29 languages and found that the more a language community values
an individualistic social style, the less it allows the omission of pronouns (see also Fausey &
Boroditsky, 2010; Kanero, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2016; Fausey & Boroditsky, 2011).
There is a strong possibility that the mutual constructions of such discourses through
conversation in the long run affect both pragmatics and syntax. Mutual dependence between
culture and language may also be reflected in honorific systems. East Asian languages such
as Korean, Japanese, and Chinese are more likely than English to use a variety of honorific
forms in vocabulary, syntactic structures, and discourse structures. However, within Western
languages, some languages such as French and German make lexical distinction in referring
to the second person (“you”), based on formality or distance in the relations. Furthermore,
English once had this distinction, but it has been lost over time. Considering this, the simple
theoretical framework contrasting Western and East Asian culture is likely to be insufficient
to explain the distribution of honorific systems in world languages. But it is still worth
investigating the relation between culture and honorific language in terms of the honorific
system as a whole—that is, how elaborately and extensively formality and social distance are
reflected beyond the distinctions of the second person reference (e.g., the lexical choices of
verbs such that the same action is expressed by different words depending on the social rank
of the actor).

Influence of Perception, Conceptualization, and Culture on Language: The Case of

Nominal Classification Systems
Language categorizes the world not only by words but also by the grammar.
Exploration of how language classifies the entities in the world through grammar provides
insights into how language is constrained by perception or conceptualization that are shared
by all humans and how divergence of linguistic classification may arise due to culture.
Numeral classifier systems are found across unrelated language families from
geographically diverse regions. Classifiers are used when a given noun appears with a
numeral (i.e., enumerated). For example, in Japanese, the classifier ko takes three-
dimensional objects (e.g., ball) and hon is used for one-dimensionally extended (long and
thin) items (e.g., stick, home run). The classifier tou is used for big or important animals such
as lions and cows, and hiki is for small animals like rabbits and insects. The English phrase
“five oxen” is translated as “go tou no usi (5 classifier GEN cattle)” in Japanese, in which the
classifier tou functions as a unit of quantification roughly equivalent to the English quantifier
“head”. A literal translation of “five oxen” is not possible in Japanese, but the closest
translation would be “five heads of cattle” (Quine, 1969).
The classifier systems consist of a large number of semantically formed grammatical
categories, often more than 100 (Adams & Conklin, 1973; Aikhenvald, 2000; Craig, 1986;
Grinevald, 2000; Senft, 2000). Yet the semantic features underlying the system are fairly
consistent, including animacy, size, shape, dimensionality, functionality, and rigidity (Allan,
1977; Croft, 1994). This indicates that there are certain features in the world that are salient
or important to humans, regardless of environment or culture, and that these features organize
the grammatical classification of nouns.
However, even though nominal classification systems may be organized based on
universal semantic features, the actual implementation of categories differs greatly across
cultures. For example, although Japanese and Chinese both employ animacy and shape
dimensionality in their classifier systems, Japanese follows the animate-inanimate dimension
much more strictly than Chinese; snakes are in the “small animal” category in Japanese and
“long and flexible” category in Chinese (Saalbach & Imai, 2012). Thus, even though
languages may employ similar nominal classification systems that are organized by shared
semantic systems, resulting categories can be very different, in terms of which nouns are
included in a specific grammatical category. It is not clear to what extent the decision of
category membership— e.g., whether “table” should be included in the “flat things” category
or the “mechanical things” category—is influenced by culture-specific construal of things.
In considering the extent to which universally natural conceptualization governs
grammatical classifications of nouns, it is interesting to see whether the distinction
concerning countability, an important conceptual distinction in English and other related
languages, is reflected in numeral classifier systems. The concept of countability has been
considered critical for organizing human concepts, and hence it has been called an
“ontological concept” (Quine, 1960, 1969). This distinction is grammatically marked in many
languages (Fedden & Corbett, 2018). Because classifiers are required for all nouns, it has
been long assumed that classifier languages do not mark countability by grammar and treat
all nouns as mass nouns (e.g., Chierchia, 1998; Lucy, 1992; Quine, 1969). However, some
theorists have proposed that classifier languages do distinguish count nouns and mass nouns
through the selection of classifiers (Cheng & Sybesma, 1998, 1999; Yi, 2009, 2010; Zhang,
2007, 2013). They argue that nouns denoting nonindividuated things (i.e., mass nouns) are
quantified by mass classifiers, analogous to quantifiers in English that specify the unit of
quantification. In contrast, nouns denoting countable things (i.e., count nouns) accompany
different kinds of classifiers (i.e., count classifiers), which classify nouns by their semantic
type, as described earlier. Thus, the countability of nouns may be a good example of a
universal factor that is reflected in nominal classification systems in grammar (e.g., Fedden &
Corbett, 2018).
Besides countability (i.e., the distinction between count/mass), gender is one of the
dominant semantic criteria for noun classification (Corbett, 1991). Here again, many
languages spoken in geographically and culturally distant regions employ gender marking
systems. Furthermore, many of them employ countability and gender simultaneously in their
noun classification systems (e.g., Fedden & Corbett, 2018). It seems that countability and
gender are salient and critical conceptual distinctions in organizing noun concepts regardless
of culture. However, as is the case with numeral classifier categories, the ways in which each
language implements the gender marking grammatical system are diverse across languages.
Many languages have more than two gender classes, adding extra semantic classes: some
languages additionally have the neutral class (i.e., neither female or male); other languages
create their own classes that appear exotic and incomprehensible to nonspeakers. For
example, Ngam’gityemerri, an Austlarian language, has 15 gender classes, including male,
female, canine, animal, vegetable, tree/thing, as well as semantically very specific genders for
long woomeras, canegrass spears, and digging sticks (Fedden & Corbett, 2018, originally
reported in Reid, 1997, p. 165). Some of these semantic classes seem deeply rooted in the
culture’s mythology and tradition, but it is difficult to draw generalizations about how culture
contributes to the formation of language-specific gender grammar systems (Fedden &
Corbett, 2018).

Summary and Synthesis: Does Language or Culture Affect the Structure of Language?
This article has considered how thought—both perception and conceptualization—
and culture might affect the structure of language, addressing whether it was culture or
language that contributes to the diversity in how language codifies perceptual or conceptual
information, and whether there is universally encoded information despite the great diversity.
Languages carve up the world differently, both lexically and grammatically. Constraints on
linguistic structure exist in many lexical or grammatical domains (e.g., the conceptual
distinction between walking and running or semantic distinctions that are encoded in nominal
classification systems), pulling unrelated languages toward loosely principled ways of
dividing the world (Malt et al., 2008). These commonalities seem to arise not only from
perception but also from natural conceptualization shared by all humans, as is the case with
countability and gender.
There does not seem to be a simple or general rule about how languages divide the
world into discrete lexical and grammatical categories and which universal perceptional or
conceptual features are codified into a specific language. However, in some domains with a
relatively small semantic space, such as the continuum from walking to running, language
may be more likely to encode natural boundaries all humans perceive (Malt et al., 2008).
Also, as per grammatical categories, although there are universal features such as
countability, gender, shape, and animacy that are commonly coded in grammatical categories
classifying nouns, cultural factors such as culture-specific value systems and mythology also
add semantic classes and contribute to determining category membership. Perhaps the most
reasonable conclusion is that perception, universally shared natural conceptualization, and
culture affect each other in a complex manner for the structure of the lexicon and
grammatical classes.

Influence of Language and Culture on Thought

The Whorfian Hypothesis: Stronger Versions

We now explore the relation between language and thought from the other end—that
is, whether and how language might affect thought. As noted, the relation between language
and thought has typically been investigated with respect to the Whorfian hypothesis (Whorf,
1956), which was traditionally interpreted as the question of whether language influences
perception and cognition to the degree that speakers of different languages have
incommensurably different conceptual representations and cognitive styles (e.g., Gleitman &
Papafragou, 2013; Pinker, 1994).
There has been a long-lasting disagreement on whether the Whorfian hypothesis can
be supported. Some researchers, especially those who advocate that universally shared
modularized cognitive functions are behind language, strongly deny the Whorfian view and
argue that any effect that seems to show differences in cognition is ephemeral and peripheral
to human cognition (e.g., Gleitman & Papafragou, 2013; Pinker, 1994). However, recent
research in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, and cognitive anthropology have
accumulated evidence for the influence of language on thought in many different ways. In
some domains, the influence seems fairly strong, and in other domains, it is more nuanced.
Fairly strong support for the Whorfian hypothesis has been reported in the
conceptualization of space (Levinson, 1996, 2003) and numbers (Gordon, 2004). Languages
use different frames of reference (FoR) in describing spatial relations—the relative FoR and
the absolute FoR. The relative FoR uses terms such as front/back/left/right, thereby the position
of the target object is described in light of a relative perspective from the speaker or the hearer
in a given context. The absolute FoR determines the position of the target object using
geographically absolute terms such as north/south/west/east. English and many other
languages use both FoR systems, but the relative frame is more dominant. Several languages
rely on the absolute
FoR and do not have relative terms such as front/back/left/right. They also use the absolute
FoR when describing the relative location of a small object on a table (Levinson, 2003;
Pederson et al., 1998). For example, Guugu Ymidirr, an Australian Aboriginal language
described the picture in Fig. 1 as follows: “There are two girls. One’s nose points to the east
and the other to the south. There is a tree in the middle.” (cf. Haviland, 1993, 1998)

Figure 1. Picture book for description of the spatial relation of the two girls. From Levinson
(2003, Fig. 4.2; also see Haviland, 1993, 1998).

Does the constant use of absolute FoR improve the ability of speakers to keep track of
the absolute direction? Levinson (1997, 2003) compared dead reckoning abilities in speakers
of languages using absolute FoR and speakers of Dutch, who dominantly use the relative
FoR. The participants were taken to a distant, unfamiliar location away from home, and were
asked to point to the direction of their home. The speakers of languages using the absolute
FoR were much more accurate than speakers of Dutch, including experts in orienteering
competitions (but see Li & Gleitman, 2002, and Li, Abarbanell, Gelitman, & Papafragou,
2011, for a view against this; see also Levinson, Kita, Haun, & Rasch, 2002).
A similar pattern of results has been found for the domain of numbers. Pirahã, a
language in
Amazonia, does not have number words. The language seems to vaguely distinguish “one”
and “two.” Any number larger than two is expressed as “large quantity” or “much.” Even the
distinction between “one” and “two” is not applied consistently, so the word may mean
“small quantity” or “little,” in an English sense (Frank, Everett, Fedorenko, & Gibson, 2008;
Gordon, 2004).
Do speakers without number words think differently about numbers than those who
have an elaborate number word system in their lexicon? Gordon (2004) addressed this via a
simple experiment with adult speakers of Pirahã. The researchers tapped Pirahã speakers on
the shoulder and asked them to tap back the same number of taps. The Pirahã speakers’
tapping behavior was inaccurate and inconsistent: when tapped three times, they would tap
back twice, three times, four times, five times, and so on. Just as continuously describing
spatial relations with the absolute direction may change speakers’ dead-reckoning ability, the
presence or absence of number words may change speakers’ number concepts.
These findings may be taken as strong support for the Whorfian hypothesis, in that
lexical systems strongly change cognitive ability or concepts that are fundamental to human
cognition, such as spatial cognition or number concepts.

The Whorfian Hypothesis: Weaker Versions

Differences in pattern of lexicalization across languages do not always produce a
dramatic consequence as in the domain of space and number. It is not that no effect has been
found, but that the effect seems to be more nuanced. One such example is the domain of
color.
The domain of color was brought to researchers’ attention in evaluating the Whorfian
hypothesis. As mentioned in the introduction, some languages such as Dani distinguish only
two colors, lacking all corresponding English color terms. If a strong version of the Whorfian
hypothesis holds true, speakers of the Dani would not be able to distinguish colors as do
English speakers. However, a series of experiments by Rosch (1973) rejected this possibility
(see also, Heider, 1971). Rosch tested Dani children and adults and demonstrated that Dani
people were not only able to distinguish “different” colors in the English sense but also to
distinguish focal colors, which are a shade of colors that are considered as the best example
of a given color category, against non-focal colors: The participants were able to remember
focal colors better than nonfocal colors in a memory task and were able to learn new labels
attached to focal colors better than nonfocal colors. These results were taken as strong
evidence against the Whorfian hypothesis at that time.
However, a plethora of research thereafter showed the effect of language on color
perception in more nuanced ways. In their classic study, Kay and Kempton (1984) presented
speakers of English and of Tarahumara, a language spoken in a community in Northern
Mexico, with a triad of three chips of different shades of blue and green varied by brightness.
Tarahumara and many other languages do not lexically distinguish the colors labeled as
“green” and “blue” in English, whereas other languages make finer lexical distinctions than
English. For example, languages like Russian, Greek, and Japanese name light blue and dark
blue with different monomorphemic (basic-level) names. In the study, participants judged
which of the three chips was the “odd one,” or least like the other two. As Tarahumara does
not lexically distinguish blue and green, all chips were in the same lexical category; in
contrast, in English, the chips belonged to two different categories (i.e., blue and green). The
study found that English speakers distorted the distance according to the lexical boundary:
two chips were perceived to be more similar when they were within the same lexical
category, and less similar when two chips crossed the lexical boundary. No such pattern was
seen in the Tarahumara speakers.
A great number of studies were conducted to unravel how this effect arises at a fine
level of cognitive and neural processing (e.g., Fontenau & Davidoff, 2007; Gilbert, Regier,
Kay, & Ivry, 2006; Holmes, Franklin, Clifford, & Davies,2009; Regier & Kay, 2009;
Roberson, Pak, & Hanley, 2008; Siok et al., 2009; Tan et al., 2008; Thierry et al., 2009;
Winawer et al., 2007). For example, Thierry et al. (2009) tested the brain response of English
and Greek speakers using event-related potential (ERP) methods. Using the oddball
paradigm, in which the participant is presented with a repetitive sequence of stimuli from the
same category that is disrupted by the appearance of a stimulus from another category (i.e.,
oddball), English and Greek speakers observed two types of color changes: the change from
(prototypical) blue to light blue and the change from (prototypical) green to light green. The
presentation oddballs is known to sometimes elicit mismatch negativity (MMN) in ERP
experiments. In English, both tokens of blue colors were labeled “blue” and both tokens of
green were labeled “green.” In contrast, Greek has different words for blue and light blue, but
not for green and light green, so that the change from blue to light blue goes across lexical
boundaries whereas the change from green to light green is within the same lexical category.
The researchers found the MMN in Greek speakers for the blue–light blue change, but no
such change for the green–light green change. English speakers did not show MMN for either
change. Importantly, the visual stimuli changed not only in color but also in shape (i.e., a
circle and a square), and the participants were instructed to detect the shape change and did
not consciously pay attention to the color change in either condition. Speakers of English and
Greek can detect color changes when they pay enough attention, and in this sense, they share
a “common” perception for colors. However, they showed a different neural response without
even realizing it.
A similar pattern has been observed for the similarity rating of everyday objects.
People speaking different languages do notice common features that are not encoded in labels
or identify similarity among objects, even though they do not receive the same lexical label
(e.g., Malt, Sloman, Gennari, Shi, & Wang, 1999, objects; Malt et al., 2008, walking).
Clearly, people’s sense of similarity between objects or categories they spontaneously form is
not perfectly determined by lexical categories in their language. At the same time, differences
in lexical categories influence the sense of similarity in a nuanced way. Masuda et al. (2017)
asked English and Japanese speakers to rate the similarities in a pair of objects, using images
of objects that corresponded to two distinct linguistic categories in English (e.g., “bean” and
“pea”), but only one category in Japanese (e.g., “mame”). In both language groups, objects
belonging to one linguistic category in their own language were perceived as more similar
than those belonging to two separate categories.
Thus, in the domains of color and objects, lexical boundaries seem to affect thought,
but the effects may be subtler and more nuanced than the previously discussed cases of space
and number domains.

Influence of Grammatical Categories on Thought

We now consider whether different systems of nominal classification affect the
construal of entities. First, let us consider the presence or absence of consistent marking of
count/mass distinction in grammar. As discussed in the previous section, the count/mass
grammar marks a critical ontological distinction (i.e., countability) that is directly related to
the notion of identity of entities. This critical difference between objects and substances leads
to fundamentally different extension principles for the determination of category membership
across the two ontological kinds. For example, the label “cup” is applied to any whole object
of a similar “cup” shape, regardless of its color and material components. If a “cup” is broken
into pieces, each piece no longer constitutes a “cup.” In contrast, the word “clay” is extended
to any portion of clay, irrelevant of shape. Thus, the distinction pertaining to individuation
has been considered as one of the most important ontological distinctions (e.g., Pelletier,
1979; Quine, 1969; Soja, Carey, & Spelke, 1991).
Theorists disagree on whether or not numeral classifier languages grammatically mark
the count/mass distinction (Allan, 1977; Chierchia, 1998; Krifka, 1995; Lucy, 1992; Quine,
1969, vs. Chen & Sybesyma, 1999; Mizuguchi, 2004; Yi, 2009, 2010; Zhang, 2007, 2013).
Even if we take the position that countable nouns and uncountable nouns are distinguished by
the choice of classifiers or particular linguistic constructions for quantifications, the
distinction is much less salient and consistent compared to the ways English-type language
marks it.
Does grammatical marking of countability affect thought? Three predictions are
possible in response to this question. In the strongest version, we might predict that speakers
of a language that does not have a grammatical system that explicitly and systematically
marks the count/mass status of the noun do not possess the ontological distinction between
objects and substances. Here, it is implied that the ontological distinction is acquired through
repeated and consistent exposure to the distinction in grammar; for example, if a child’s
native language does not provide this linguistic opportunity, she or he will not learn the
conceptual distinction (Quine, 1969). The second possibility is the opposite of the first
prediction. The conceptual distinction between objects and substances is so fundamental that
the difference in grammatical coding of this conceptual distinction would not affect thought.
Japanese children might possess the distinction between the object kinds and substance kinds
innately, or at least by the time they start learning words (Soja et al., 1991; also see Hespos,
Ferry, & Rips, 2009). Also, because the distinction between object kinds and substance kinds
are perceptually transparent, Japanese speakers’ construal of objects and substances—how
they determine a given entity is countable or uncountable—would be no different from that of
English speakers. The third prediction lays in the middle of the two extreme possibilities,
which would be analogous to the pattern found for the color domain: Speakers of classifier
languages, including young infants, can understand the fundamental conceptual distinction
between object kinds and substance kinds, but how they determine the category membership
of the two kinds is different due to the influence of language.
Imai and colleagues investigated this question (Imai & Gentner, 1997; Imai &
Mazuka, 2007). The results supported the third possibility. Japanese children, whose
language does not saliently mark the count/mass status of nouns, did show appreciation of the
ontological distinction between object kinds and substance kinds. They were able to
generalize a novel noun associated with an object and a substance in the way that manifests
appreciation of the ontological distinction, even when the noun was presented without any
linguistic cue flagging its count/mass status (e.g., with a classifier used for objects or a mass
classifier used for substances). This result might be taken as evidence against the strong
version of the Whorfian hypothesis, as speakers showed the understanding of the ontological
distinction regardless of language. However, at the same time, English and Japanese speakers
differed in where they drew a line between objects and substances. When Japanese speakers,
both toddlers and adults, were presented with an entity made of solid substance with a simple
shape that did not imply any function, Japanese speakers did not show a preference for object
construal versus substance construal. In other words, they treated the entities with ambiguous
perceptual affordance as ambiguous. In contrast, English-speaking toddlers and adults
showed a strong bias toward object construal for these simple-shaped solid entities. While
English speakers judged that a solid thing would likely be an object, regardless of whether or
not it has an apparent function, Japanese speakers seemed to require both solidity and shape
complexity (that indicates functionality) for a physical entity to be construed as a countable
object. Thus, although the conceptual distinction between objects and substances are
available much before children start learning language, especially learning the grammatical
distinction between count nouns and mass nouns, exposure to language does affect the
concepts of object kinds and substance kinds in the category boundary of the two ontological
kinds (see Imai & Mazuka, 2007, and Imai & Masuda, 2013, for more detailed discussion).
Likewise, evidence for a weak version of the Whorfian hypothesis has been found for
the classifier systems. Saalbach and Imai (2007, 2012; also see Imai, Saalbach, & Stern,
2010) tested whether the classifier categories would influence speakers’ sense of similarity
between objects. Three possible scenarios were tested: (1) classifier categories function as a
dominant organizer of concepts (cf. Lakoff, 1987; Zhang & Schmitt, 1998); (2) classifiers do
not have any cognitive impact; (3) classifiers heighten speakers’ sense of conceptual
similarity but have no major influence on how concepts are structured in their minds. Again,
the results supported the third hypothesis, that is, the middle ground position: Chinese and
German speakers relied on taxonomic and thematic relations in judging similarity and in
drawing inductive inference about nonobvious properties. This result rejects the first
possibility, which is the strong version of the Whorfian hypothesis. However, Chinese
speakers rated similarity between a pair of objects belonging to the same classifier category
significantly higher than a pair in which two objects were drawn from different classifier
categories (see also Imai, Schalk, Saalbach, & Okada, 2014; Saalbach, Imai, & Shalk, 2012
for additional support for the middle ground position on the influence of grammatical gender
on the representation of biological sex of animals)

Summary and Synthesis: Influence of Language on Thought

Overall, support for the Whorfian hypothesis has been accumulated in the literature,
but the strength or directness of the effect of language on thought varies across conceptual
domains. If the presence or absence of a particular lexicalization system enhances certain
cognitive ability or invites emergence of concepts, that would be taken as fairly strong
evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis. Such strong evidence has been reported in the domain
of spatial cognition (Levinson, 2003; Majid, Bowerman, Kita, Haun, & Levinson, 2004) and
number concepts (Gordon, 2004). However, the effect of language is much more nuanced and
subtler in most perceptual/conceptual domains. People notice similarity among different
colors, objects, or actions even though they are put into different lexical or grammatical
categories. At the same time, cross-linguistic differences in lexical or grammatical categories
often lead to subtle differences, such as category boundary shifting, category perception,
construal of similarity, and differential brain responses.

How Do Culture and Language Affect Thought?

Does Culture or Language Affect Thought?

In evaluating the Whorfian hypothesis, it is extremely difficult to determine whether
the effect assumed to be evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis is truly attributable to
language or if it should be attributed to culture instead, because language is deeply embedded
in culture. However, researchers have attempted to separate language and culture as much as
possible. The term “culture” is meant and treated differently by cognitive
psychologists/anthropologists and cultural psychologists. We begin with the former case.
Cognitive anthropologists/psychologists have reported results of field research that
show spatial cognition and number concepts are heavily influenced by language (see the
section “In fluence of Language and Culture on Thought”). However, the data discussed in
this article were collected from regions where ecology (the natural environment), subsistence,
and values are very different from industrialized societies that rely on modern technologies.
One way to narrow down whether the different cognitive abilities possessed by indigenous
societies should be attributed to language or culture is to investigate cognitive abilities across
indigenous societies with similar ecology, lifestyles, and level of education but with different
languages.
In the domain of spatial cognition, the results seem to suggest that language rather
than culture leads to the cognitive difference. Levinson (2003) compared the dominant FoR
and ability of way-finding between Guugu Yimidir and Dutch people and studied speakers of
Tzeltal, a Mayan language, in Tenejapa, Mexico (Brown & Levinson, 2000). This language
also uses the absolute FoR and does not have relative terms like front/back/left/right, as does
the language of the Guugu Yimidir people. Speakers of Guugu Yimidir and those of Tzeltal
are indigenous people whose level of education is comparable, but the natural environment
surrounding these people as well as their subsistence are very different. The former are
hunter-gatherers and the latter are agricultural people. It turned out that Guugu Yimidir and
Tzeltal speakers both show superior ability of way-finding (i.e., the ability of dead
reckoning). This result may be interpreted to imply that language rather than culture is a
critical factor behind the dead-reckoning ability.
What about the number concept? Again, it seems to be language rather than culture.
Spaepen, Coppola, Spelke, Carey, and Goldin-Meadow(2011) tested profoundly deaf
individuals in Nicaragua, who use homemade gestures (home signs) due to the lack of proper
exposure to a conventional sign language. These home-signers are integrated into a numerate
society, yet have difficulty generating exact numbers that are larger than three, like Pirahã
adults. These results provide support for the possibility that language is critical for the
acquisition of exact numbers.
However, the dominance of language over culture on thought does not seem to hold
for all major perceptual/conceptual domains. For the domain of olfaction, Majid and Kruspe
(2018) examined whether the exceptionally superior ability to categorize and label olfaction
in Jahai and Manique people (Majid & Burenhult, 2014; Wnuk & Majid, 2014) should be
attributed to ecology, subsistence, or language. For that purpose, Majid and Kruspe (2018)
further investigated two language communities, Semaq Beri and Semelai, which belong to the
same language family and live in the same ecological environment (tropical rainforest), but
differ in subsistence. Semaq Beri are hunter-gatherers and Semlai are not. Different from the
cases of spatial cognition and number concepts, they reported that only hunter-gatherer
Semaq Beri showed superior olfactory performance, similar to other hunter-gatherers such as
Jahai and Manique people. This finding suggests that, different from the case with spatial
cognition and number cognition, the special ability is more likely to be attributed to culture
than to language.
Taken together, it is difficult to draw a general conclusion on whether language or
culture affects special cognitive ability or manner of conceptualization in a particular domain.
It is likely that a culture-specific, special manner of cognition or conceptualization arises
from a complex interaction of culture, language, and the nature of the conceptual domain.
One thing we need to consider, however, is what aspect of “culture” affects thought.
Cognitive anthropologists and psychologists seem to define culture in light of how people
live, for example, whether they subsist by hunter-gathering or agriculture. In contrast, cultural
psychologists see culture as a combination of internal factors such as collective values or
worldviews shared among members of the society. Perhaps hunter-gatherers have different
value systems than horticulturists, and these collective value systems may be related to the
superior ability to categorize odor.

Culture and Language Can Affect Thought Simultaneously

It is also possible that language and culture influence thought simultaneously. As
discussed earlier, an important theoretical framework in cultural psychology contrasts
cultures that have independent social orientation versus interdependent social orientation.
Members of the former type of culture tend to view themselves as independent of other social
members, whereas the latter tend to view themselves as socially embedded within a web of
dense relationships among social groups (Kitayama & Uskul, 2011; Kitayama, Varnum, &
Salvador, 2019; Markus & Kitayama, 1991, 2010; Miyamoto, 2013; Nisbett, 2003; Varnum
et al., 2010). Nisbett and colleagues (Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan,
2001) have further proposed that East Asian people tend to have an interdependent social
orientation, while Caucasian Europeans (Westerners) tend to have an independent social
orientation. These orientation styles lead to differences in attention to relations that connect
elements in the environment. Westerners tend to focus on individual elements of the
environment separately, and East Asians tend to pay attention to the unified whole. Based on
this scheme, the
researchers made a specific prediction regarding the conceptual structures of East Asians and
Westerners: East Asians, with their predisposition to see a scene or event as a whole, are
expected to categorize the world around thematic relations; Westerners, with their focus on
properties of individual objects, are expected to categorize the world by taxonomic relations
(Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001).
Saalbach and Imai (2007) employed a paradigm in which the influence of language
(the impact of a classifier system) and culture (culture-specific biases of Easterners and
Westerners) on conceptual structures were examined simultaneously, in that the relative
importance of taxonomic relations, thematic relations, and classifier relations were evaluated
within the culture. Participants in both language groups gave the highest ratings for the
taxonomic pairs, followed by the thematic pairs, followed by the classifier pairs. Consistent
with the results of the categorization task, both Chinese and German participants rated the
“same classifier” pairs as more similar than the control pairs, in which two objects did not
share any of the three relations (i.e., taxonomic, thematic, classifier). This result suggests that
even speakers of nonclassifier languages can detect an inherent similarity between objects
belonging to the same classifier category. However, the results also indicates that this
inherent similarity is magnified for speakers of classifier languages. For example, Chinese
participants’ similarity judgments for pairs drawn from the same classifier classes were
significantly higher than those of the German participants. Importantly, Chinese speakers also
gave higher similarity ratings for thematically related object pairs than the German speakers.
Thus, taken together, the pattern of results suggests that language and culture could influence
people’s concepts and cognitive processes simultaneously and independently, and warrants
reconsideration of the traditional approach, which assumes the influence of language and
culture to be contrastive and asks which single factor shapes thought.

Conclusion and Future Directions

This article has provided a comprehensive review of research on the relations among
language, culture, and thought, and suggests that no simple conclusion can be drawn. Both
children and adults share universal conceptual structures and basic cognitive functions that
are likely to have arisen from factors given by the world (e.g., perceptual) and those residing
within humans (e.g., natural conceptualization). This does not mean that there is no room for
language or culture to modulate perception and cognition. Language and culture highlight
certain aspects of the world and provide bases for categorization. The influence of language
and culture on thought becomes stronger when there are no perceptible divisions and
becomes subtler when the divisions are perceptually salient.
The relations among language, culture, and thought are not unidirectional and are
extremely complex, such that culture affects language, language affects thought, and
universally shared thought determines the structure of language. In many conceptual
domains, linguistic categories are likely to reflect universal division or salient commonalities
in the world, but at the same time, linguistic categories modify perceived similarities (see
Imai & Mazuka, 2003, 2007; see also Malt, 1995, for a relevant discussion). Culture and
language can conjointly affect thought. For example, cultural values affect how finely a given
conceptual domain is labeled, but labels invite contrasts among differently named categories
and increase attention to corresponding conceptual distinctions and relational commonalities
(Gentner, 2016; Gentner & Christie, 2010; Lupyan, 2012; Lupyan, Rakison, & McClelland,
2007).
 Given such complexity, the relations among language, culture, and thought defy
simple and extreme views (e.g., the view that universally shared thought determines human
conceptualization across different cultures and languages and the view on the other extreme,
i.e., language or culture determines thought). It is important to investigate these relations at
different levels, but with clear specification of what “language” means and whether language
is separable from culture in the particular investigation at hand (Imai, Kanero, & Masuda,
2016; Imai & Masuda, 2013). Because the relative weights of the three are likely to differ
across domains, future research needs to specify not only how thought is constrained by
language, culture, and universally shared perceptual and cognitive bases but also how these
factors interact with one another across diverse conceptual domains. It is also important to
uncover the developmental trajectory along which language or culture-specific “thought”
emerges.
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