Lera Boroditsky - US grants

Do the quirks of different languages affect how speakers think about the world? Do English, Mandarin, Russian, or Turkish speakers experience the world differently simply because they speak different languages? Do they partition the world in different ways or remember things differently? Does learning a new language change the way you think? Do speakers of multiple languages think differently when speaking different languages? Dr. Lera Boroditsky seeks answers to these and other questions in her National Science Foundation funded research.
A different way to ask the previous questions is: What is core or universal in human cognition? The question of universality has long been a touchstone for controversy. Despite much attention and debate, however, definitive answers have not been forthcoming. Dr. Boroditsky reformulates the relations between language and thought toward resolving this debate. She introduces innovative and subtle methods that have greater sensitivity to interactions between language and thought. The intellectual merits of the research come from her fresh creative approach to a problem that most other scientists had put aside.
Broader impacts of this funded project are in its educational benefits. These include many terrific research opportunities for students. The focus on languages in addition to English insures participation of groups who are underrepresented in American science. The funded research is also the basis for two new courses at MIT aimed at both graduate and undergraduate students, and for a new textbook for undergraduates.

One emerging view in cognitive science is that language understanding is fundamentally grounded in perception. In this view, mental simulation or mental imagery serves as the basic substrate through which people represent and process linguistic meaning. However, such theories can only have explanatory power if there is a detailed understanding of the mechanisms underlying mental simulation and mental imagery. If mental imagery proves to be just as mysterious as language understanding, then there is little use in trying to explain one in terms of the other. In the present work, Dr. Lera Boroditsky of Stanford University explores the nature of mental imagery and the relationships between language understanding, mental imagery and perception. The studies examine whether imagined, inferred and real motion show the same motion aftereffect properties in response to changes in perceptual contrast, motion speed, motion type, and frame of reference. Dr. Boroditsky will also explore whether motion imagery is affected by cultural differences in how specific languages represent space. For example, residents of Pormpuraaw, a remote aboriginal community on the west coast of Cape York in Australia, organize space according to cardinal directions (as in "there is an ant on your North-West leg"). This raises the possibility that people who have learned different default ways of organizing space in their language or culture may be imagining motion in different sets of spatial coordinates.


This research has the potential to draw important connections between cognition and perception, two areas that are often viewed as separate. If the characteristics of one's language fundamentally affect perception, this has broad implications for understanding mathematics, which is known to be strongly related to spatial cognition. Effective teaching methods for learners in different cultures should be sensitive to, or exploit, how language structures perception.

Most experimental studies in the behavioral sciences rely on college students as participants for reasons of convenience, and most take place in North America and Europe. As a result, studies are only sampling from a narrow range of human experiences. The results of these studies have limited generalizability, failing to reflect the full range of mental and behavioral phenomena across diverse cultures and backgrounds. However sampling from broader populations is challenging, due to limited opportunities and access, heightened cost, and the need for specific knowledge about how to adapt research protocols to different communities. The goal of this workshop is to develop some tools and guidelines to help researchers overcome barriers to broader sampling, and to incentivize doing so through better institutional support.

The goal of this workshop is to develop tools to support and encourage increased robustness and generalizability in the experimental behavioral sciences. The meeting is dedicated to identifying and developing potential solutions to the so-called "WEIRD people" problem: the fact that most experimental behavioral science research is conducted with members of WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democracies). The discovery that much of this research fails to generalize to broader populations and fails to capture the range of human patterned variation in thought and behavior creates a pressing need for research approaches to be more inclusive. Although there are researchers throughout the world who have developed effective models for overcoming these limitations, there are significant barriers to achieving robust and generalizable experimental behavioral research for most researchers. This workshop will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines whose research represents positive case studies of how to overcome these barriers. The participants aspire to accomplish three goals: 1) develop tools and training materials to help researchers enhance diversity in their research populations, 2) develop infrastructure solutions for connecting researchers across diverse contexts and populations, and 3) develop a set of recommendations for institutional changes to support enhancing diversity in experimental behavioral science through manuscript, grant, and tenure review.