The September edition of the French scientific review Pour la Science reissues a captivating article by Stanford cognitive psychology professor Lera Boroditsky, first published in Scientific American, last February.

For centuries, she writes, we suspected “that different languages may impart different cognitive skills” and that “the speakers of different tongues may think differently”. That had yet to be proven.

Her research team got down to the subject, and was eventually drawn to the conclusion that “language shapes even the most fundamental dimensions of human experience: space, time, causality and relationships to others“.

Boroditsky’s article is rich in telling examples. We learn for instance that space and time references are actually very different depending on the language we speak, and the environment in which we evolve.

The researcher reports an experience initiated after she met a five-year old Indigenous little girl in North Australia: “When I ask her to point north, she points precisely and without hesitation. My compass says she is right. Later, back in a lecture hall at Stanford University, I make the same request of an audience of distinguished scholars—winners of science medals and genius prizes. (…) I ask them to close their eyes (so they don’t cheat) and point north. Many refuse; they do not know the answer. Those who do point take a while to think about it and then aim in all possible directions. I have repeated this exercise at Harvard and Princeton and in Moscow, London and Beijing, always with the same results.”

Certain Aboriginal languages do not include the words left and right; everything, including the little details of everyday life, depends on the cardinals: “the cup is southeast of the plate” or “the boy standing to the south of Mary is my brother.”

Another example is that of the expression of time; present, past, and future: “English speakers unconsciously sway their bodies forward when thinking about the future and back when thinking about the past. But in Aymara, a language spoken in the Andes, the past is said to be in front and the future behind.”

Likewise, calculation: Chinese children who speak Mandarin appear able to learn the base-10 insight sooner because the underlying base-10 structure is more transparent in their language – whereas it isn’t as regular, for instance, in English or French.

The article also mentions the question of gender. Children’s awareness of gender occurs earlier in Hebrew than in Finnish, for example, because “Hebrew marks gender prolifically”. And on a cognitive level, the difference is significant, as “children growing up in a Hebrew-speaking environment figure out their own gender about a year earlier than Finnish-speaking children”.

Boroditsky’s conclusion is quite clear: “Each [language] provides its own cognitive toolkit and encapsulates the knowledge and worldview developed over thousands of years within a culture. Each contains a way of perceiving, categorizing and making meaning in the world, an invaluable guidebook developed and honed by our ancestors. Research into how the languages we speak shape the way we think is helping scientists to unravel how we create knowledge and construct reality (…).”

Full article available here.