overview

The citizens of cognation investigate the relationships between mind, world, and language. How do we construct knowledge from our experiences with the world? How do we use our knowledge to interpret new experiences? In what ways have languages and cultures allowed us to go beyond our innate capabilities and physical experiences to make us as smart as we are?

Read some recent articles about our work in the New Scientist, the Boston Globe [on-line or print version], in the Scientific American, or listen to Lera's recent interview on NPR [low quality or high quality].

how do we mentally represent things we've never seen or touched?

How do we come to represent and reason about abstract domains like time, justice, or ideas? There are at least two interesting puzzles here. First, how do we learn about abstract domains despite the dearth and vagueness of sensory information available about them? And second, how are we able to coordinate our mental representations of these domains enough to agree (at least some of the time) on the fairness of a decision, the strength of someone's love, or the worth of an idea?

Do people who speak different languages think differently about the world? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?

We've looked at the influence of language on the patterns of early vocabulary acquisition in English and Navajo, on thinking about time in English, Greek, Spanish and Mandarin, on color memory and color perception in English and Russian, on people's thoughts about the gender of toasters (and other inanimate objects) in Spanish and German, and on people's representations of actions and events in Indonesian, Mandarin, Turkish, and Russian.

Suppose you read that "Mary had a little lamb." What do you actively know about Mary's lamb at the very moment of understanding? Do you know the color of its fur, or whether or not lambs have lungs? How did you choose which of the great many things you know about lambs to include in your working representation of Mary's lamb? How does your representation change if we add "with mint sauce"?