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I. INTRODUCTION
One of the key quests of cognitive science is to understand both the universal-
ity and the diversity of human conceptual structures and cognitive processes.
The overall goal of this chapter is to provide a new framework to investigate
the role of language and culture in human cognition, by reviewing a program
of research that investigated this issue across several different conceptual
CHAPTER 1
The Role of Language and
Culture in Universality and
Diversity of Human Concepts
MUTSUMI IMAI AND TAKAHIKO MASUDA
Abstract
e in uence of language and culture has been investigated across di erent
research disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural
psychology, but such research all tends to ask whether language (or culture)
in uences cognition in general, without clearly specifying what is meant by
“language” or “culture.” is chapter proposes an alternative approach, whose
aim is to specify a complex interplay among various factors—including universal
cognitive constraints, perceptual a ordances provided from the world,
task-speci c constraints, language-speci c biases, and culture-speci c cognitive
styles—to account for people’s behavior in a given cognitive task and the
developmental trajectory of that behavior. To establish this point, four research
programs examining the roles of language and culture in terms of construal and
organization of objects, relations among objects, and actions are reviewed.
Keywords: W h o r an hypothesis, conceptual development, lexical development,
conceptual universals, object categorization, count-mass, taxonomic relations,
thematic relations, classi ers, lexicalization patterns, verb learning
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2 Advances in Culture and Psychology
domains. Specifically, we address how two major factors—language and cul-
ture—uniquely or interactively affect conceptual representation and cognitive
processes.
The influence of language and culture on cognition has been investigated
across different research disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive psychol-
ogy, and cultural psychology (a subdivision in social psychology). These disci-
plines are interested in different aspects and levels of cognition using different
methodologies, but they all tend to treat language and culture without clearly
specifying what they mean by “language” or “culture.” Furthermore, they tend
to approach the issue in a simple black-and-white fashion, simply asking
whether language (or culture) influences cognition in general.
We propose an alternative approach that assumes a complex interplay
among various factors—including universal cognitive constraints, perceptual
affordances provided from the world, task-specific constraints, language-specific
biases, and culture-specific cognitive styles—to account for people’s behavior
in a given cognitive task. Here, the goal of research is not to determine whether
but rather to specify how particular aspects of language or culture interact
with one another or interact with universal cognitive biases and constraints,
the structure of the world, and constraints placed by the task (e.g., what type
of information or knowledge is most relevant for the inference).
In sections II through V, we review our research programs, which extended
across four conceptual domains: (1) how we construe entities and classify
them as objects and substances (Imai & Gentner, 1997; Imai & Mazuka, 2007);
(2) how we utilize and weigh three types of conceptual relations—taxonomic
relations, thematic relations, and classifier relations—in engaging cognitive
tasks (Imai, Saalbach, & Stern, 2010; Saalbach & Imai, 2007, 2011); (3) how
we map objects and actions onto nouns and verbs and how we generalize novel
nouns and verbs (Imai, Haryu, & Okada, 2005; Imai, Li, Haryu, Okada,
Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Shigematsu, 2008); and (4) how we talk about action
events and how language-specific lexicalization patterns are related to atten-
tion to the objects and background of action scenes (Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek,
Golinkoff, Imai, Haryu, Vanegas, . . . Sanchez-Davis, 2010; G ö ksun,
Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, Imai, Konishi, & Okada, 2011). In all four programs of
research, the complex relations among language, culture, and universally
shared cognition are specified based on evidence from cross-linguistic experi-
ments, and the developmental trajectory of language and culture-specific cog-
nition is addressed. In section VI, we integrate the findings from the four lines
of research programs.
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 3
Before going into our research programs, however, we briefly review how
the influence of language and culture has been investigated in the disciplines
of cognitive psychology and social psychology, respectively.
A. Relation Between Language and Thought: The
Whorfi an Hypothesis
Many studies have been conducted to address whether language influences
people’s concepts and cognitive processes at the lexical, grammatical, or dis-
course level. (For reviews, see Boroditsky, 2001; Bowerman & Levinson, 2001;
Chiu, Leung, & Kwan, 2007; Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003; Gumperz &
Levinson, 1996; Hunt & Agnoli, 1991; Kashima & Kashima, 2003; Lucy, 1992;
Malt & Wolff, 2010). The question concerns linguistic relativity , or the
Whorfian hypothesis (Whorf, 1956), an hypothesis named after sociolinguist
Benjamin Lee Whorf. Noting diversity across different languages, and in par-
ticular through his observations of the drastic differences between native
American languages such as Hopi and those he called Standard European
Languages (SEL), Whorf argued that our perception of the world is like a
“kaleidoscopic flux of impressions” and that language can carve these percep-
tions in any arbitrary way. In this sense, language determines thought.
A massive body of research has examined the influence of linguistic catego-
ries on thought, and the strongest interpretation of linguistic determinism (that
the linguistic forms of one’s language determine what it is possible to think) has
long been abandoned. Still, there are ongoing disagreements among researchers
regarding the Whorfian hypothesis. The hypothesis has been approached in two
ways (see Imai & Mazuka, 2003, 2007, for fuller discussions). The traditional
approach is to select two or more language groups that differ in a linguistic cate-
gorization—be it grammatical categorization of objects, spatial relations, or
color—and to then compare the speakers’ performance in cognitive tasks that
should reflect linguistic categories (for reviews, see Bowerman & Levinson,
2001; Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003; Malt & Wolff, 2010).
For example, in the domain of color perception, researchers have asked
whether speakers of a language that does not distinguish “blue” from “green,”
or a language that has two distinct basic-level labels for blue (roughly “lighter
blue” and “darker blue”), perceive the regions of the color band corresponding
to what English speakers call “blue” and “green” differently (Davidoff,
Davies, & Roberson, 1999; Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000; Tierry,
Athanasopoulos, Wiggett, Dering, & Kuipers, 2009; Winawer, Witthoft, Frank,
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Wu, Wade & Borodistky, 2007). Time is another conceptual domain that has
attracted much attention. For example, researchers have asked whether
Chinese speakers, whose language expresses temporal order of events not only
along the horizontal axis (before and after) but also along the vertical axis (up
and down), construe timelines differently from English speakers (Boroditsky,
2001; Chen, 2007; January & Kako, 2007). In neither domain, however, has a
decisive conclusion been reached. Whereas some researchers argue that their
data support the Whorifan hypothesis (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001; Davidoff et al.,
1999; Roberson et al., 2000), others present evidence against it (Chen, 2007;
January & Kako, 2007; Regier, Kay, & Cook, 2005).
The Whorfian hypothesis has been debated in another venue as well.
Researchers have investigated the relation between language development
and conceptual development, asking how language acquisition changes chil-
dren’s concepts and cognition. If children’s concepts and cognitive processes
are greatly changed through learning a language, this might be considered as
evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis (e.g., Carey, 2001; Gentner, 2003;
Spelke, 2003). For example, young children prefer to form categories based on
thematic relations (e.g., dogs and things that are seen with dogs). However, as
they learn language, they become aware that labels pick out taxonomic rela-
tions rather than thematic relations. This consequently leads them to form
categories based on taxonomic relations even without the invocation of labels
(Imai, Gentner & Uchida, 1994; Markman, 1989).
If children learn to classify and organize the world through language
learning, then given the fact that linguistic categories are diverse across differ-
ent languages, the resulting concepts and cognitive processes should be diverse
and specialized to the particular languages the children are learning (e.g.,
Bowerman & Choi, 2001; G ö ksun et al., 2011; Lucy & Gaskins, 2001). For
example, the English language categorizes spatial relations with respect to
containment or support but not with respect to whether two objects (i.e., fig-
ure object and ground object) are in tight-fit or loose-fit relation; the Korean
language however, does specify such a relation. English-reared infants are
originally sensitive to perceptual difference in tight-fit and loose-fit relations
(Hespos & Spelke, 2004). However, as they learn their native language, they
lose their sensitivity to the tight-fit/loose-fit difference between two cases in
which the figure object is contained by the ground object: the case in which
something is loosely contained in something (e.g., an apple in a bowl) and the
case in which there is tight-fit containment (e.g., a finger in a ring) (Choi,
McDonough, Bowerman, & Mandler, 1999).
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 5
Although developmental researchers in general agree that language pro-
pels conceptual development in children, again, there are a group of develop-
mental researchers who are antagonistic to the Whorfian hypothesis. They
argue that reported cross-linguistic (or cross-cultural) differences do not
deserve serious attention or consideration for understanding the nature of
human cognition (e.g., Gleitman & Papafragou, 2005; Li & Gleitman, 2002;
Pinker, 1995) in the face of innate and universal conceptual building blocks
with which human infants are endowed, as demonstrated by the finding that
not only Korean but also English-reared infants can distinguish the tight-fit
and loose-fit relations between two objects (Hespos & Spelke, 2004). In other
words, all infants have the ability to learn language along more or less the
same path, regardless of the culture and language they are raised in. Therefore,
diversity due to language differences should be negligible (e.g., Bloom, 2000;
Li, Dunham, & Carey, 2009; Pinker, 2007; Soja, Carey, & Spelke, 1991).
In summary, there have been disagreements about the universality and
diversity of human cognition, and the debate about the Whorfian hypothesis
is far from being settled. It makes intuitive sense that human cognition has
both universal and language- or culture-specific aspects. The disagreement to
a large extent reflects researchers’ preference for highlighting either the com-
monalities or the differences, when in fact there are always both. However, the
Whorfian hypothesis has been treated largely in a black-and-white fashion,
and relatively little effort has been made to specify the exact scope of
cross-linguistic differences in a global picture of human cognition.
In this chapter, we address the issue of relations between language and
cognition from a standpoint in the middle, between the universalists and the
language determinists; we assume that universality and diversity are both
present in human cognition. As stated earlier, our goal is not to determine
whether the Whorfian hypothesis is right or wrong. Rather, we attempt to
specify the relative magnitude of universality and of language- or culture-spe-
cific diversity and how the latter arises in the complex interactions among
various factors residing both inside humans and out in the world.
B. Relation Between Language and Culture
The relation between language and culture has also not been adequately addressed.
Researchers’ lack of consensus regarding the role of language and culture in
human concepts and cognitive processes stems largely from the fact that the sub-
disciplines define language and culture differently. These definitions, in turn,
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6 Advances in Culture and Psychology
constrain their research and their conclusions. Many researchers, particularly
those who investigate the Whorfian hypothesis within the tradition of cognitive
psychology, tend not to consider the influence of culture or how language and
culture interact with each other. Other researchers, mostly sociocultural psychol-
ogists who follow the social psychology tradition and hence are more interested
in the role of culture in shaping people’s behavior and cognitive dispositions than
that of language, have largely conflated language with culture (e.g., Hamilton,
Gibbons, Stroessner, & Sherman, 1992; Kashima & Kashima, 1998). Cognitive
psychologists tend to test the influence of specific linguistic categories of narrow
scope, whereas sociocultural psychologists examine the influence of language
defined in a broader sense—often language as a whole as a tool for communica-
tion (Chiu et al., 2007). Although both types of psychologists talk about the influ-
ence of language, what they mean by “language” is often very different.
The relation between culture and language has been oversimplified as
well. We do not mean to say that no meaningful conclusions can be drawn
about the general role of language and culture in human cognition. However,
researchers need to be much more careful in specifying what the terms lan-
guage and culture mean.
In this chapter, to specify the role of language and culture and to avoid
confounding of the two factors as much as possible, we take the cognitive psy-
chology approach, with language defined as specific grammatical or lexical cat-
egories as stated earlier, and we discuss the influence of language in a narrow
and limited sense (i.e., the influence of the particular target linguistic category
being dealt with). Likewise, we define the influence of culture in a specific
sense, largely following a prevalent cultural model of cognition in East Asians
and Westerners in the cultural psychology literature (e.g., Nisbett, 2003;
Nisbett & Masuda, 2003; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). We then
address the influences of language and culture separately whenever possible,
but we also discuss how the two work conjointly. At the end of the chapter, we
broaden our perspective and discuss the role of language and culture in the
broad sense — how language embedded in a particular culture as a whole is
related to our mode of communication and thinking.
II. LINGUISTIC/CULTURAL UNIVERSALS AND
DIVERSITY IN THE CONSTRUAL OF OBJECTS AND
SUBSTANCES (RESEARCH PROGRAM 1)
In this section, we present research that examines whether systematic gram-
matical marking of individuation (i.e., count/mass grammar) influences speak-
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 7
ers’ ontological concepts or construal of novel physical entities. We compared
Japanese-speaking children and adults with English-speaking age counter-
parts to test three possibilities. The first possibility is that, as language deter-
ministic theorists maintain, the presence of count/mass grammar leads to
fundamentally different concepts about physical entities. The second possibil-
ity (the middle ground position) is that count/mass grammar does not lead to
fundamentally different ontological concepts but does affect speakers’ atten-
tion to certain perceptual dimensions (e.g., whether people attend to the shape
of the physical entity or the materials of which the physical entity is made).
The third possibility is that, as language universalists maintain, the presence
or the lack of count/mass grammar does not affect speakers’ conceptual under-
standing of objects and substances at all. Based on the findings of Imai and her
colleagues (Imai & Gentner, 1997; Imai & Mazuka, 2007), we maintain the
second possibility. At the end of the section, we discuss the magnitude of the
effect of culture rather than language on this phenomenon.
A. Linguistic Diversity in Coding the Count/Mass
Status of Entities
Objects (e.g., cup) and substances (e.g., clay) have fundamentally different cri-
teria for the notion of “sameness.” When we talk about whether two objects are
the same, we are referring to two objects in their entirety, and not to two dis-
tinctive parts of a single object. The word cup is applied to whole objects of a
similar “cup” shape, regardless of color or material components, that can
potentially contain liquid. If a cup is broken into pieces, each piece no longer
constitutes a “cup.” In contrast, when we talk about whether the two substances
are the same , we do not judge based on the notion of entirety, because there is
no such thing as “whole sand,” “whole water,” or “whole clay” (cf. Quine, 1969).
Different from the word cup , the word clay is extended to any portion of clay,
regardless of shape.
In many languages, there are grammatical markers that differentiate
objects from substances. For example, in English, object names are linguisti-
cally marked as count nouns, whereas substance names are marked as mass
nouns, and people can detect whether the name for the target entity is a count
or a mass noun based on these markers (e.g., whether we use “a” or “ a piece
of”) (Wierzbicka, 1988). In contrast, languages called classifier languages clas-
sify all nouns (i.e., not only mass nouns in the English sense but also count
nouns) by using special grammatical markers such as “a piece of” in English
(Imai, 2000; Imai & Gentner, 1997; Imai & Mazuka, 2007; Lucy, 1992); these
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8 Advances in Culture and Psychology
languages treat individuation in quite a different manner from English. For
example, in the classifier language Japanese, if X denotes a noun, then in the
sentence, Kore (This) wa (Topic particle) X desu (IS-polite), meaning “This is
X,” X can, among other things, refer to either an object or a substance. Japanese
also does not make the singular/plural distinction. In the absence of context,
someone hearing the sentence Kore wa X desu would not know whether X
referred to one or multiple items (see also Imai, 1999; Imai & Haryu, 2001).
In English, substances are quantified by explicitly providing a unit of
quantification (e.g., two glasses of water, two bottles of water). In languages
such as Japanese, classifiers provide a similar function (Craig, 1994). But
importantly, this numeral + classifier construction is not limited to what are
considered mass nouns in English; it is required for quantifying any noun,
including count nouns that denote apparently individuated entities such as
people, animals, cars, or chairs, as in the phrase, 2-hiki no neko (2 hiki —classi-
fier for small animals, no —genitive marking particle, neko —cat). Given these
observations, in classifier languages, nouns in general, including those clearly
referring to individuated objects, have often been characterized as mass nouns
for which a unit of individuation is explicitly given (e.g., Chierchia, 1998; Lucy,
1992; Quine, 1969; but see Cheng & Sybesma, 1998; Yi, 2009). For example,
Quine (1969) noted that the Japanese word ushi may be more closely trans-
lated as the English mass noun cattle rather than as count nouns ox or cow ,
because when ushi is quantified, it needs to be individuated by the classifier
tou (“head”), for example in a phrase such as 5-tou no ushi .
B. Psychological Consequences of Linguistic
Diversity: Quinian or Whorfi an Relativity
To what extent do the differences in syntactic structure influence people’s cog-
nitive processes? A radical version of linguistic relativity would hypothesize
that speakers of a classifier language cannot possess the notion that objects
and substances are fundamentally different—to the extent that they can be
characterized as ontologically different (Quine, 1969). According to the
Quinian hypothesis, infants should have no way of knowing that the word
rabbit does not refer to just a portion of a whole rabbit. Likewise, nothing can
prevent a very young child from assuming that a piece (e.g., handle) of the cup
he is now holding is also a referent of the word cup , as is also the case for milk .
The only way a child can come to know the fundamental ontological difference
between cup and milk is through observations that his language (English)
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 9
consistently distinguishes the former (objects) from the latter (substances):
The word cup is always preceded by “a” or followed by “s,” whereas this pattern
is almost never observed for milk .
The second, and milder, possibility is that the linguistic difference with
respect to systematic marking of count/mass status modifies speakers’ relative
attention to the perceptual dimensions (e.g., shape, color, material) that are
important for determining the status of individuation for entities. For example,
Lucy (1992) hypothesized that, because objects are clearly differentiated from
substances by the count/mass grammar in English, and because shape is gener-
ally the strongest perceptual cue in determining category membership for
objects, English speakers should manifest a stronger attention to shape in
determining similarity. In contrast, because classifier languages treat all enti-
ties as undivided mass consisting of a certain substance, speakers of a classifier
language should show a stronger attention to the material of the entity. Speakers
of a classifier language might be able to appreciate the distinction between
objects and substances; in other words, they might understand that the cate-
gory membership of objects should be determined on the basis of shape simi-
larity, while also knowing that shape is not relevant for determining the cate-
gory membership for substance kinds. Nevertheless, language may bias speak-
ers to pay attention to a particular perceptual property in determining whether
the given thing is an object or a substance. That is, broadly speaking, we could
imagine that people share a universal way of distinguishing objects and sub-
stances from each other, but that linguistic differences may also influence how
speakers of different languages divide entities in nuanced ways.
Finally, the language universalists would argue for the third possibility,
that the way of differentiating objects from substances is universal across all
humans and therefore categorization processes are not affected by language
(Soja et al., 1991).
Imai and Gentner (1997) tested the above three possibilities by compar-
ing Japanese-reared and English-reared children of three age groups (early
2-year-olds, late 2-year-olds, 4-year-olds) and adults. Imai and Gentner devised
a word extension task in which the experimenter introduced a novel word
(e.g., dax ) in association with an unfamiliar physical entity that the children
had never seen before. Participants were presented with a target entity as well
as two test items and were asked to judge to which of the two alternative enti-
ties the label given to the target entity should be applied. One of the test items
was the same as the target with respect to shape but different in material. The
other alternative entity was the same as the target with respect to material
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10 Advances in Culture and Psychology
composition but different in shape. Children’s choice between the same-shape
or same-material alternative should tell us which of the two dimensions chil-
dren use for generalizing the novel label (Figure 1.1).
To minimize the effect of grammatical constraints, Imai and Gentner
(1997) used specific wordings. For English speakers, the novel words were
introduced in such a way that participants could not know whether the entity
is syntactically seen as a count or a mass noun — for example, “Look at this
dax . Can you point to the tray that also has the dax on it?”. Because the gram-
matical structure of Japanese does not reveal the noun’s status of individua-
tion, sentences in Japanese naturally did not provide countability information
about the target entity — for example, “ Kore (this) wa (Topic-marking particle)
dax desu (IS). Dochira (which) no (genitive) sara (tray) ni (locative particle) dax
ga (subject-marking particle) aru (exist)?”.
Imai and Gentner (1997) then set up three different types of physical
entities. The first type, the complex objects , were real artifact objects that had
fairly complex shapes and distinct functions (see Figure 1.1a). For example, a
T-joint pipe made of plastic (target) was presented along with a metal T-joint
pipe (shape test) and broken pieces of the target (material test). If the
(a) (b)
(c)
FIGURE 1.1: Sample material sets for a complex object trial (a), a simple object trial (b),
and a substance trial (c).
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 11
participant pointed to the metal pipe, it was assumed to be an indicator that
he or she construed the thing as a countable object. In contrast, if the partici-
pant pointed to the plastic pieces, it would indicate that he or she saw the
target entity as an uncountable substance. The second type of entity, the sim-
ple objects, had very simple structures with no distinct parts. They were made
of a solid substance, such as wax, and were formed into a very simple shape.
For example, a kidney-shaped piece of wax (target) was presented together
with a kidney-shaped piece of plaster (shape test) and some wax pieces (mate-
rial test) (see Figure 1.1b). The third type of entity, the substances, were non-
solid substances, such as sand or hair-setting gel, that were arranged into dis-
tinct, interesting shapes when presented. For example, a target of wood chips
formed into a U-shape was presented together with tiny leather pieces config-
ured into a U-shape (shape test) and piles of wood chips (material test). Here,
Imai and Gentner hypothesized that solid entities with complex and cohesive
structures would be more naturally (and perceptually) individuated than enti-
ties with simple structures. They also hypothesized that entities with simple
structures would be more naturally individuated than nonsolid substances.
Both Japanese and English children and adults clearly showed similar
classification styles based on the entities’ perceptual appearance. That is, all
participants tended to show an object construal and to extend the labels by
shape when they engaged in the complex object trials. They showed a sub-
stance construal when they engaged in the substance trials. The pattern sug-
gests that even 2-year-old Japanese children, who had no knowledge of the
concept of count/mass syntax found in English, could apply different rules for
determining identity for complex objects and substances.
However, when English and Japanese speakers’ classifications were exam-
ined more closely by comparing the behavior of the two language groups
within each trial type, there was a marked difference in how English and
Japanese speakers construed the simple objects and the substances. For exam-
ple, in the simple object trials, English speakers treated the simple-shaped dis-
crete entities in the same way as the complex objects and showed a clear object
construal bias, whereas Japanese children did not show any systematic ten-
dency in their classification. In fact, Japanese adults tended to see the simple
objects as uncountable substances, choosing the material alternative more
often than the shape alternative. Similarly, in the substance trials, whereas
Japanese speakers almost always generalized novel words based on the mate-
rial identity, English speakers did not show any specific tendency in
classification.
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In sum, Imai and Gentner’s (1997) results suggested that the ontological
distinction between objects and substances is universally shared, refuting the
strong version of linguistic relativity (e.g. Quine, 1969). At the same time,
they also uncovered noteworthy cross-linguistic differences between the two
language groups in a way that was in part consistent with Lucy’s (1992)
proposal.
C. Developmental Trajectory of Shape Versus
Material Bias Across Linguistic and Nonlinguistic
Contexts
Are the cross-linguistic differences found in the word extension classification
task replicable in a no-word classification task in which people are asked to
determine which of two test stimuli is the “same” as the standard? Many stud-
ies have reported that children tend to form more adult-like, consistent cate-
gories when asked to determine an extension of a novel label (i.e., to find new
referents of the label given to a target entity) than when asked to determine
the “same” object without using any labels (e.g., Imai et al., 1994; Landau,
Smith, & Jones, 1988; Markman & Hutchinson, 1984; Waxman & Gelman,
1986; Waxman & Kosowski, 1990). If that is the case, the language effect
would be weakened when people engage in a no-word classification task.
To examine this possibility, Imai and Mazuka (2007) tested Japanese-
speaking and English-speaking 4-year-olds and adults, using a no-word clas-
sification task. The stimuli and the procedure were the same as in the word
extension task used by Imai and Gentner (1997), except that word labeling
was not involved. The participants were presented with a target entity and two
alternatives and were asked to select which of the alternatives was the same as
the standard entity. The English instruction was “Show me what’s the same as
this,” and the Japanese instruction was “ Kore (this) to (with) onaji-nano (same)
wa (topic-marking particle) docchi (which) desuka (IS-question)?”
The results in general indicated that, across the three trial types, Japanese
speakers put more weight on the material in determining the referent of the
word (material bias), whereas English speakers put more weight on shape (shape
bias). Thus, the cross-linguistic difference found in the word extension task
(Imai & Gentner, 1997) was replicated in the no-word categorization task.
The detailed analysis revealed that the adults’ performance in this no-word
categorization task was virtually identical to that observed in the word exten-
sion task, as shown in Figure 1.2b (American adults) and Figure 1.2d (Japanese
adults). In the simple object trials, for example, adult English speakers and
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 13
adult Japanese speakers showed the opposite classification patterns. In con-
trast to adults, children’s classification styles in the no-word classification task
were very different from the styles they showed in the word extension task.
This discrepancy between the word extension and no-word classification tasks
was particularly large in English-speaking children (see Figure 1.2a). Whereas
the English-speaking children in the word extension task showed virtually the
same response patterns as the adult English speakers, their performance in the
no-word categorization task was at a chance level in all three trial types.
Complex Simple Substance
0
20
40
60
80
100
%
S
H
A
P
E
R
E
S
P
O
N
S
E
%
S
H
A
P
E
R
E
S
P
O
N
S
E
American 4-year-olds
Trial Type
Complex Simple Substance
Trial Type
Complex Simple Substance
Trial Type
Complex Simple Substance
Trial Type
Word
No Word
0
20
40
60
80
100
Japanese 4-year-olds
0
20
40
60
80
100
Japanese Adults
0
20
40
60
80
100
American Adults
FIGURE 1.2: Subject’s classification behavior in the no-word context on word extension
(neutral-syntax) tasks and nonlexical classification tasks: American 4-year-olds (top left),
American adults (top right), Japanese 4-year-olds (bottom left), and Japanese adults
(bottom right).
(Adapted from Imai & Mazuka, 2007.)
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D. Language-Specifi c Construals of Entities
Constrained by Universal Ontology
What can be concluded so far from the results of Imai and Gentner’s (1997)
and Imai and Mazuka’s (2007) studies? First, participants’ classification in
terms of the ontological distinction between objects and substances is univer-
sally shared, regardless of whether the speaker’s native language grammati-
cally marks this distinction. However, at the same time, it appears that
language-specific syntactical structures can influence the default construal of
entities that are located around the boundary of the two ontological kinds.
The structure of the English language seems to bias English speakers toward
the object construal (i.e., bias to classify perceptually ambiguous entities based
on shape), whereas the structure of the Japanese language seems to bias
Japanese speakers toward the substance construal (i.e., bias to classify percep-
tually ambiguous entities based on material). English speakers may develop
simple perceptual heuristics that can be instantly applied even when they have
very little knowledge about the target entity. Because solidity and bounded-
ness are in general very good indicators for individuation, English speakers
may also develop a bias toward construing any solid, bounded entity as an
individuated object, even including simple-structured entities that could as
well be construed as chunks of rigid substances. Also, because complex shape
is another good indicator of individuation (Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001),
English speakers may form a strong sensitivity to shape, and this may have led
the English speakers in our studies to think that the complex shapes in which
the nonsolid substances were configured indicated individuation, even though
they could see that those entities were indeed portions of nonindividuated
substances.
To what degree Japanese speakers’ classification was influenced by lan-
guage is not so clear, because there are two possible ways of interpreting the
results. This is in part because two interpretations are possible concerning the
count/mass status of nouns in classifier languages. Some linguists and phi-
losophers (e.g., Chierchia, 1998; Quine, 1973) maintain that all nouns in clas-
sifier languages are indeed mass nouns (e.g., the Japanese noun ushi should be
regarded as equivalent to the English word cattle , but not ox or cow ). In this
framework, Japanese speakers’ classification would be interpreted as a mate-
rial bias. Alternatively, Japanese speakers’ understanding of physical entities
could be interpreted as a direct reflection of the entity’s perceptual nature, and
we could imagine that the classifier markers did not play any important role at
all in their classification. With the current data, it is difficult to tease out these
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 15
two possibilities. As we describe later, however, the response pattern of
English-speaking 4-year-olds in the no-word classification task was more simi-
lar to that of Japanese children and adults than to that of English-speaking
adults. This suggests that Japanese speakers’ classification pattern may be
more natural than English speakers’ classification pattern; it may be the count/
mass grammar that leads English speakers to deviate from the natural parti-
tion of the object ‒ substance continuum.
E. Ontological Concepts Shaped by Language
As we have reviewed in section I, developmental researchers have noted that
language fosters conceptual development, and this can be considered as sup-
port for the Whorfian hypothesis. This was exactly what we found in our study
as well.
The research of Imai and Mazuka (2007) revealed an interesting develop-
mental pattern of language-specific biases. English-speaking children’s perfor-
mance was very similar to that of English-speaking adults in the linguistic
context when they engaged in the word extension task, but their performance
in the no-word classification task was more similar to that of the Japanese
children than it was to that of adults in their own language group. In contrast
to children, adults within each language group showed virtually identical
response patterns in classification behavior across the word extension and the
no-word classification contexts. This pattern suggests that children first
become sensitive to conceptual/semantic features that are relevant to making
language-specific categories in the realm of language, and this sensitivity grad-
ually forms into a language-specific bias that is habitually applied even in situ-
ations that do not directly involve language.
What should be highlighted even more is the fact that both English- and
Japanese-speaking children showed classification according to the ontological
constraints in the context of word extension but not in the no-word context.
But what do we mean by saying that children’s classification is “ontologically
constrained” in word extension? Imai and Mazuka (2007) set up an experi-
ment in which, in contrast to the previous forced-choice experiment, children
were allowed to choose as many test items as they wished. In the no-word clas-
sification context, children tended to choose both the shape test item and the
material test item simultaneously within a single trial. In other words, they
simply selected the items that were “the same” either in shape or in material.
As a result, the formed category was a chain-like category, “things of the same
shape OR of the same material.” However, in the word extension context, chil-
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16 Advances in Culture and Psychology
dren rarely made this chain-like category, choosing either the shape or the
material item, but not both, within a single trial. In other words, children
know that a linguistic label does not refer to a chain-like category. They know
that if a label refers to an object, then material is not relevant for determining
other category members; they also know that if a label refers to a substance,
shape is not relevant for determining the sameness of the item to the target.
However, without some form of the understanding that objects and sub-
stances are of fundamentally different existences, children could not have
applied different extension principles to a novel noun associated with a novel
object or a novel substance (Huntley-Fenner, Carey, & Solimando, 2002; Soja
et al., 1991).
We should note, however, that the rudimentary conceptual understand-
ing that objects and substances have different natures does not always lead
to formation of categories on the basis of ontological constraints. Things
can be categorized in many ways, so there is more than one way of grouping
them. For example, we can classify things on the basis of similarity in one
particular perceptual dimension such as shape, texture, or color. Alternatively,
we can group the same things on the basis of a thematic relation or on the
basis of biological and behavioral characteristics shared among members of
the ontological or taxonomic kind. Even though children at a certain age
might have a rudimentary understanding of the ontological distinction
between objects and substances, in the presence of multiple kinds of simi-
larity they might not yet know how adults in their community group things
in the world by default when a special goal or context is not specified.
Language is one force that draws children’s attention to the kinds of catego-
ries that are normally used by adults in their community (Gentner & Namy,
1999; Imai et al., 1994).
F. Culture and Language
As mentioned earlier, the relation between language and culture is a thorny
issue, especially when one wishes to separate the two and determine which of
them is responsible for the observed difference between two groups. After all,
the differences between Japanese speakers and English speakers (Americans)
found by Imai and Gentner (1997) might be attributable to culture instead of
language. In fact, some cultural psychologists (e.g., Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett et al.,
2001) discussed the differences between Americans and Japanese in terms of
culture-specific ways of perceiving the world, which were inherited by indi-
viduals through the history of the culture. They further claimed that cultural
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 17
variations in classification in Imai and Gentner could have been mediated by
people’s cultural views rather than differences in grammar. So which of the
two factors (language vs. culture) is most likely responsible for the differences
between Americans and Japanese?
We admit that it is in general extremely difficult to separate the two fac-
tors experimentally. However, for this particular case of differences between
English and Japanese speakers, the results of a control study by Imai and
Mazuka (2007, Experiment 3) favor the interpretation that language is the
primary factor in explaining the difference in classification styles between
English and Japanese speakers. In this experiment, the stimuli and the pro-
cedure were the same as those used in the Imai and Gentner (1997) study of
word extension with ambiguous syntax, with one exception: A novel noun
was presented either in the count noun or the mass noun syntactic frame.
The participants in the count noun condition heard novel nouns in the count
noun syntax throughout across the three entity types (complex object trials,
simple object trials, and substances trials). Likewise, for those in the mass
noun condition, novel nouns were presented in the mass noun syntax for all
the trials. The instruction used in the count syntax condition was, “Look!
This is an X (pointing the target entity). Can you point to another X?” The
instruction for the mass noun condition was, “Look! This is X. Can you point
to some more X?”
As shown in Figure 1.3, when novel nouns were presented in the mass
noun syntactic frame, the default classification pattern (i.e., the pattern in the
ambiguous syntax case in Imai and Gentner’s 1997 study) was drastically
changed by the syntactic markers. The English-speaking adults’ response pat-
tern in the mass noun condition showed a random response in the complex
object trials (48%), presumably because the complex objects invite the object
construal very strongly and the syntactic information conflicts with this
strong default construal. In contrast, they showed a material bias in the simple
object trials (85% material response). This suggests that, despite a strong bias
toward construing a simple-shaped solid lump of substance as an individuated
object, they were fully capable of mapping a novel label to the material of the
entity. In the substance trials, again they selected the material alternative
highly above chance level (87%).
The response pattern shown by the English-speaking children in the mass
noun condition was overall very similar to the adults’ pattern, showing a ran-
dom response pattern in the complex object trials, and a high rate of material
responses in the substance trials (59% and 19.6% shape response, respectively).
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However, in contrast to the adults, the 4-year-olds’ performance in the simple
object trials was at the chance level (46% shape response).
Recall that in the word extension task in which the ambiguous syntax was
used, the English-speaking children’s shape response level was very high
(91%), in fact almost as high as that for the complex objects (95%). Even
though their performance in the simple object trials in the mass noun syntac-
tic frame was at the chance level, their shape-based responses decreased by
45% from the ambiguous syntax case. Therefore, English-speaking 4-year-olds
definitely knew that mass noun syntax flags the target entities as substances
(see also Subrahmanyan, Landau, & Gelman, 1999, for similar findings).
However, because they were so strongly biased toward construing any discrete
Complex Simple Substance
0
20
40
60
80
100
4-year-olds
Adults
Neutral Syntax
%
S
H
A
P
E
R
E
S
P
O
N
S
E
Trial Type
Complex Simple Substance
0
20
40
60
80
100
4-year-olds
Adults
%
S
H
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P
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R
E
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P
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Count-Syntax
Trial Type
Complex Simple Substance
0
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4-year-olds
Adults
%
S
H
A
P
E
R
E
S
P
O
N
S
E
Mass-Syntax
Trial Ty
p
e
FIGURE 1.3: English speakers’ classification behavior in the neutral-syntax condition (top)
(from Imai &Gentner, 1997), the count-syntax condition (middle), and the mass-syntax
condition (bottom).
(Adapted from Imai &Mazuka, 2007.)
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 19
entities as individuated objects (Bloom, 1994; Shipley & Shepperson, 1990), it
may have been difficult for them to overcome this bias and to construe the
entities used in the simple object trials as portions of substances. As in the
complex object trials, the mass noun syntax was strongly in conflict with their
construal of the entities, and hence their responses fell to chance level.
The response pattern in the count syntax condition was almost identical
to the pattern found in the ambiguous syntax word extension task for both
age groups, showing a very high rate of shape responses. This is no surprise
for the complex and simple object trials, because the rates of shape responses
in these two trial types were already at ceiling in the ambiguous syntax case.
For the substance trials, however, we had expected to see an increase in
shape responding in the count syntax condition, because count syntax indi-
cates that the referred entity is individuated. However, surprisingly, both
the children and the adults responded randomly, just as in the ambiguous
syntax case.
This suggests that English speakers assumed the novel nouns presented
in the ambiguous syntactic frame to be count nouns. Because the count/mass
syntax is obligatory in English, perhaps the English speakers in Imai and
Gentner’s (1997) study did not encode the noun as having a “neutral” syntac-
tic status. Even though the nouns’ syntactic status was made ambiguous, the
children may have assumed that the nouns were count nouns rather than
mass nouns, possibly because the count interpretation is more common for
“the/this/that X” (Samuelson & Smith, 1999).
To summarize, the fact that English speakers’ object-substance construal
reflected their performance in the count noun condition seems to support the
idea that language—at least the presence of count/mass grammar in this
case—affects English speakers’ object-substance construal.
G. Summary
In this section, we reviewed the research of Imai and her colleagues (Imai &
Gentner, 1997; Imai & Mazuka, 2007;see also Imai, 2000; Imai & Mazuka,
2003) on object-substance classification tasks, discussing (1) the validity of
language relativism versus universalism, (2) the developmental trajectory of
the classification process, and (3) the magnitude of cultural versus linguistic
explanation of the findings.
First, we underscored the importance of considering universality and
diversity simultaneously and in a balanced manner in order to understand
the nature of human concepts and cognition. To account for the universality
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in the object-substance categorization, it is particularly important to note
that the presence of the ontological concept of individuation is not the sole
factor that is responsible for the similar classification behavior between
Japanese speakers and English speakers. To some degree, the world is struc-
tured to form natural clusters, inviting humans to categorize entities
according to these natural divisions (e.g., Berlin, 1992; Rosch, 1978). This
point strongly resonates with the prototype theory, in which entities that
lie at the center of each cluster are considered to be better members than
those that are located near the boundary of an adjacent cluster (Rosch &
Mervis, 1975).
In Imai and colleagues’ research, the objects used in the complex object
trials would be considered better members of the class of object kinds than
those used in the simple object trials, and indeed, participants’ classification
pattern was greatly affected by how strongly the perceptual nature of the tar-
get entity invited humans to place it into a particular category. When the per-
ceptual affordance of a given entity strongly suggested the entity’s individua-
tion status, then there was little room for language to affect people’s default
construal for that entity (cf. Gentner, 1982). When the perceptual affordance
of the entity was weak and ambiguous, language influenced the construal,
pushing the boundary between object kinds and substance kinds one way or
the other (cf. Gentner & Boroditsky, 2001; Malt, 1995; Medin, Lynch, Coley,
& Atran, 1997).
Second, we discussed how the influence of language can be seen through
the developmental patterns that occur as a language is acquired. Hearing labels
for an entity sharpens children’s sensitivity to the ontological differences
between object kinds and substance kinds and leads them to ontologically
constrained categorization.
Third, we maintained that, although it may be attractive to explain the
classification process as an effect of culture, overgeneralization of a single
explanation needs to be avoided, and careful investigation is needed, espe-
cially since the issue is highly relevant to the syntactic structures of a given
language. Of course, we do not rule out the possibility that culture plays a role
here, over and above linguistic factors. Further research will help us identify to
what extent linguistic factors and cultural meaning systems separately or
interactively influence human psychological processes.
In sum, to fully understand the issue of diversity and universality in how
people understand and construe object kinds and substance kinds, we need to
investigate how our universal cognitive disposition and universally possessed
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 21
knowledge interact with language-specific linguistic properties as well as cul-
ture-specific cognitive biases and, furthermore, how these two factors interact
with the way the world is structured and presents itself to humans.
III. CONCEPTUAL RELATIONS AMONG OBJECTS
(RESEARCH PROGRAM 2)
In this section, we further address complex relations among language, culture,
and cognitive processes by first introducing research findings that emphasize
the effect of language (Zhang & Schmitt, 1998) on one hand and the effect of
culture (Ji, Zhang, & Nisbett, 2004) on the other hand. We then introduce a
series of studies that comprehensively examine the relations among language,
culture, and cognitive processes (Saalbach & Imai, 2007, 2011; see also Imai &
Saalbach, 2010). Saalbach and Imai’s research program examined how speak-
ers of Chinese and German weighed same-classifier, thematic, and taxonomic
relations. Finally, we discuss the fact that, in this particular paradigm, the
effect of syntactic structure and the effect of cultural practices are observed
not conjointly but separately.
A. Two Prominent Conceptual Relations
We organize things (objects and substances) in the world according to various
conceptual relations. Conceptual relations are useful tools not only for catego-
rizing and judging similarity of target entities at a given moment but also for
making inductive inferences about unseen properties of novel concepts, by
means of which people enlarge their scope of knowledge and make predictions
about novel items (Medin, 1989; Murphy, 2002). Furthermore, strong con-
ceptual relations seem to be accessed automatically, as has been shown in
many studies using the semantic priming method (e.g., Meyer & Schvaneveldt,
1971; Neely, 1977).
Two conceptual relations have been particularly noted as important for
linking concepts of individual objects. One is, of course, taxonomic relations.
Taxonomic categories are denoted by nouns and include items of the same
kind. They are differentiated into levels of varying specificity (e.g., animal,
dog, collie) related by class inclusion (e.g., a collie is a dog, a dog is an animal,
a collie is an animal). Numerous studies have shown that both children and
adults apply taxonomic relations to organize concepts (e.g., Gelman &
Markman, 1986; Markman, 1989; Osherson, Smith, Wilkie, L ó pez, & Shafir,
1990; Waxman & Gelman, 1986).
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Recently, however, researchers have shown that thematic relations are
also an integral and important part of the conceptual structure, not only for
children (e.g., Imai et al., 1994; Markman, 1989; Smiley & Brown, 1979) but
also for adults (e.g., Lin & Murphy, 2001; Wisniewski & Bassok, 1999). Lin
and Murphy (2001) suggested that many human concepts include knowledge
of nontaxonomic relations, with thematic relations being the most important
among them. These authors defined thematic relations as external relations
that arise through objects’ co-occurring or interacting together in space or
time, or objects’ being linked by functional or causal relationships (e.g., table
and chair, morning and newspaper, scissors and paper).
B. Culture-Specifi c Preferences for Taxonomic and
Thematic Relations
The concept literature reviewed in the previous section suggests that taxo-
nomic and thematic relations are both important organizers of concepts,
and it assumes that this holds for all people independent of culture or lan-
guage. However, the cultural psychology literature has proposed that differ-
ent cultures show differential preference for either of the two conceptual
relations. As discussed earlier, Nisbett and colleagues have argued that,
whereas East Asians tend to view the environment as a unified whole and
pay a great deal of attention to relations that tie elements into the environ-
ment, Westerners tend to focus on individual elements separately from the
environment in which the elements are embedded (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001;
Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett et al., 2001). Along with this schema, Nisbett and
colleagues made a specific prediction that East Asians are predisposed to see
a scene or event as a whole and are expected to categorize the world around
thematic relations, whereas Westerners, with their focus on properties of
individual objects, are expected to categorize the world by taxonomic
relations.
Ji et al. (2004) tested this particular hypothesis and further attempted to
specify whether this cross-cultural difference could be attributed to differ-
ences in language rather than culture. For this purpose, they tested four groups
on an odd-one-out categorization task. The four groups were (1) American
college students, (2) Chinese college students in mainland China, (3) Chinese
students living in the United States who were from mainland China or Taiwan,
(4) Chinese students living in the United States who were from Singapore or
Hong Kong. The participants were asked to choose two items out of three that
were most closely related to each other, and the items could be grouped on the
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 23
basis of thematic relations, taxonomic relations, or neither. The American
participants were tested only in English. The Chinese groups were tested in
Chinese and in English.
Ji et al. (2004) predicted that the Chinese groups, including bilinguals,
would be more likely than the native English speakers to endorse holistic judg-
ments (i.e., categorized on the bases of thematic relations) rather than ana-
lytic judgments (i.e., categorized on the basis of taxonomic relations), regard-
less of the language used during the sessions. However, not only the Americans
but also the Chinese/English bilinguals from Hong Kong and Singapore made
groupings based on taxonomic relations more often than did the mainland
Chinese or Taiwanese. These results suggest that both cultural worldview and
language interactively play crucial roles in determining the relative weight of
taxonomic and thematic relations. But is it that language mediates the effect
of culture on categorization processes or that culture mediates the effect of
language on categorization processes? Ji and colleagues seemed to put more
weight on the effect of culture rather than that of language. However, it is a
chicken-and-egg problem. Although one could maintain that the Hong Kong
and Singapore Chinese responded more like Americans than did the mainland
Chinese because their cultures are more westernized, others could argue that
such a pattern was obtained because of their familiarity with English, which
had been established as a medium of thought from early on. In other words, it
is difficult to disentangle the effect of culture from the effect of language
through this kind of reasoning.
C. Do Classifi ers Function as Conceptual Organizers?
To further complicate matters, there is another linguistic factor that these
authors did not consider. Chinese is a classifier language. As mentioned ear-
lier, classifier languages require a classifier when quantifying entities, whether
the entity is an object or a substance. More importantly, classifiers categorize
nouns into classes and provide additional semantic information about the
nouns that are classified (Senft, 2000).
Unlike the noun lexicon, which is structured hierarchically around taxo-
nomic relations, the system of classification by classifiers is usually organized
around semantic features such as animacy, shape, function, size, rigidity, and
social importance, which largely cross-cut taxonomic categories (Craig, 1986;
Denny, 1986; Downing, 1996; Gomez-Imbert, 1996; Senft, 1996). For exam-
ple, tou is a classifier in Chinese for large animals such as cows, elephants, and
rhinoceroses. Tiao is used for objects that are long and curved or flexible,
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including both animals and inanimate objects such as roads, jump ropes,
snakes, or fish. Ba is used for objects with a handle or objects that can be
grasped by the hand, such as umbrellas, screwdrivers, brooms, keys, and
combs.
Given that a classifier system categorizes the world in a very different way
from taxonomic categories, from the Whorfian perspective it is possible that
classifier categories affect the conceptual structures of speakers of the lan-
guage. If this is the case, we expect that speakers of a classifier language and
those of a nonclassifier language will behave very differently in almost all cog-
nitive activities, including category formation, similarity judgments, and,
most importantly, inductive reasoning.
There is one study in the literature that attempted to assess the classi-
fier effect, asking whether classifiers affect conceptual organization of the
speakers. Zhang and Schmitt (1998) had speakers of Chinese and English
rate the similarity of pairs of everyday objects. Half of the pairs consisted of
objects that share the same classifier in Chinese, and half of the pairs con-
sisted of objects from different classifier categories. They found that Chinese
speakers rated the same-classifier pairs (e.g., newspaper and table) as more
similar than the native English speakers did, whereas ratings of the
different-classifier pairs (e.g., newspaper and tube) did not differ across the
two language/culture groups. On the basis of these results, Zhang and
Schmitt concluded that classifier categories strongly affect Chinese speak-
ers’ conceptual organization.
These results seem to give some support to the Whorfian hypothesis.
However, just as it is difficult to determine whether the East Asian versus
Western cultural differences in Ji et al.’s (2004) study indicated that the two
cultural groups organize their concepts in a fundamentally different fashion, it
is difficult to determine from Zhang and Schmitt’s (1998) study whether clas-
sifier relations are more prominent than thematic relations or taxonomic rela-
tions. Zhang and Schmitt’s results suggest that the classifier system may
indeed provide Chinese speakers with a way of organizing objects that English
speakers do not possess. However, even if this is the case, we would like to
know the magnitude of the impact of the classifier system relative to the
impact of taxonomic or thematic relations. It would also be good to know
whether the classifier effect found by Zhang and Schmitt is extended in tasks
of inductive reasoning. If not, claiming that the classifier system adds a new
way of organizing concepts might be an overstatement, although it could still
be taken as support for a weak form of the Whorfian hypothesis.
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 25
D. Examination of the Infl uence of Culture and
Classifi ers on Multiple Tasks
In this section, we introduce research by Saalbach and Imai (2007, 2011) that
examined whether language (presence/absence of classifier categories) or cul-
ture (West vs. East) might affect people’s concepts, using a range of cognitive
tasks. In contrast to the broad definition of language used by Ji et al. (2004),
Saalbach and Imai narrowly defined language and examined whether the pres-
ence of a specific grammatical categorization system (i.e., the classifier sys-
tem) affects people’s categorization process, similarity judgment, and induc-
tive reasoning.
With their narrow definition, Saalbach and Imai (2007, 2011) tested the
effect of a specific sense of language (i.e., classifier categories) and that of cul-
ture (i.e., East vs. West). Their design allowed for a comparison of the magni-
tude of the effect due to classifier categories (e.g., Zhang & Schmitt, 1998)
relative to that of taxonomic or thematic relations. As discussed, one impor-
tant point in evaluating the linguistic influence or cultural influence might be
to compare their reliance on taxonomic, thematic, and classifier effect across
East Asians (who are speakers of a classifier language) and Westerners (who
are not). If it turns out that East Asians use thematic relations as a basis for
core cognitive activities while Westerners use taxonomic relations, but that
neither group relies on classifier relations, it can be concluded that it is culture
rather than language that is responsible for the group difference. It is also pos-
sible to test whether speakers of a classifier language process information dif-
ferently from speakers of a nonclassfier language by examining to what extent
speakers of each language base their judgment on classifier categories.
1. Categorization
Saalbach and Imai (2007) presented Chinese (classifier language) and German
(nonclassifier language) participants with a triad of objects, one of which
served as the standard and the other two as test items. Participants were asked
to determine which of the two test items best matched the target item (e.g.,
flower). The stimuli included a taxonomic item (e.g., tree), a thematic item
(e.g., vase), a classifier item (e.g., cloud), and a control item (e.g., cup). Neither
the taxonomic item nor the thematic item belonged to the same classifier class
as the target item. The control item was unrelated taxonomically or themati-
cally to the target item and was from a different classifier class. The test items
thus included six types of contrasts around the same target item, so that the
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26 Advances in Culture and Psychology
four relations were pitted against one another in a pair: (1) classifier (cloud -
flower) versus taxonomic (tree ‒ flower), (2) classifier (cloud ‒ flower) versus
thematic (vase ‒ flower), (3) classifier (cloud ‒ flower) versus control (cup -
flower), (4) taxonomic (tree ‒ flower) versus thematic (vase ‒ flower), (5) taxo-
nomic (tree ‒ flower) versus control (cup ‒ flower), and (6) thematic ( vase ‒ flower)
versus control (cup ‒ flower).
The results indicated that Chinese speakers did not use classifier catego-
ries as the basis for categorization. When the same-classifier item was pitted
against the taxonomic or the thematic item, both Chinese and German speak-
ers made categories exclusively on the basis of the taxonomic or the thematic
relations. When the same-classifier item was contrasted with the object that
was not related to the target object (control), both Chinese and German par-
ticipants judged the same-classifier item to be the better match to the target.
This finding suggests that there is an inherent similarity among objects
belonging to the same classifier category. Even when objects do not share any
taxonomic or thematic relations, this inherent similarity is detectable even by
speakers of a nonclassifier language, and people use it when there is no other
kind of similarity to resort to in forming categories. However, even speakers of
a classifier language do not use this kind of similarity for categorization over
and above thematic relations, when thematic relations are present.
In addition, Saalbach and Imai (2007) did not find any evidence to support
the idea that German speakers (Westerners) organize object concepts around
taxonomic relations whereas Chinese speakers (East Asians) organize them
around thematic relations. Chinese and German speakers equally preferred the
thematic match over the taxonomic match. However, this does not preclude
the possibility that the classifier system makes an impact on the speakers’ cog-
nition in a subtler way, for example, by heightening attention to semantic fea-
tures underlying classifier categories, something that might be revealed by
more sensitive, finer-grained tasks. To test this possibility, similarity judgment
and inductive reasoning tasks were next conducted using a rating scale.
2. Similarity Judgments
In the similarity judgment task, Chinese and German speakers were presented
with pairs of objects and asked to judge similarity between the two objects on
a rating scale from 1 ( very dissimilar ) to 7 ( very similar ). Around the same tar-
get object, four pairs were constructed representing taxonomic, thematic,
same-classifier, and unrelated (control) relations. The objects were presented
in words rather than in pictures.
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 27
The overall pattern of rated similarity was very similar across the two lan-
guage groups. Speakers in both language groups gave the highest ratings for
the taxonomic pairs, followed by the thematic pairs and then the classifier
pairs. Consistent with the results of the categorization task, both Chinese and
German speakers rated the same-classifier pairs as more similar than the con-
trol pairs. This result again suggests that even speakers of a nonclassifier lan-
guage (German) can detect an inherent similarity between objects belonging
to the same classifier category. At the same time, however, Chinese speakers’
similarity judgments for pairs drawn from the same classifier classes were
higher than those of the German speakers, indicating that the inherent simi-
larity residing in classifier categories was magnified for speakers of a classifier
language. In addition, Saalbach and Imai (2007) reported some evidence that
gave credence to Ji et al.’s (2004) proposal but in a subtler way than they
claimed. As stated earlier, when the similarity ratings for the taxonomic and
thematic items were directly compared, both Chinese and German speakers
gave higher ratings for the taxonomic than for the thematic relations. However,
looking at just the thematic items, the Chinese speakers gave higher similarity
ratings than German speakers did for the same items. Given that Chinese
speakers tended to give higher ratings than German speakers for all items,
including the control items, we used the difference between the thematic
items and the control items as the dependent measure (Figure 1.4). Even when
the base response difference was adjusted in this way, Chinese speakers judged
Relation Ty
p
e
Chinese
German
Adjusted Score
FIGURE 1.4: Adjusted scores for each relation type among Chinese and German speakers
in the similarity judgment task in Saalbach and Imai (2007).
The adjusted score was obtained by subtracting the raw score for the control item
from each target relation in each set within each cultural group. This manipulation was
performed to adjust the baseline differences across the different cultural groups.
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28 Advances in Culture and Psychology
two thematically related objects as more similar than German speakers did,
supporting Ji et al.’s hypothesis that East Asians would put more weight on
thematic relations than Westerners. However, Chinese and German speakers
did not differ in their judgment of similarity for the taxonomic pairs. Thus, Ji
et al.’s claim was only partially supported.
3. Property Induction-Judgment with a Blank Property
In the property induction task, Chinese and German speakers were presented a
pair of objects and asked to rate the likelihood that the two objects share an
unknown property; the object pairs were the same as those used in the similar-
ity judgment task. Participants were instructed as follows: “Suppose that prop-
erty X is an important property for [Object 1]. If [Object 1] has property X, how
likely is it that [Object 2] has also property X?” The participants were asked to
judge the likelihood on a rating scale of 1 ( not likely at all ) to 7 ( very likely ).
The pattern of the results of this study was strikingly similar to the pat-
tern observed for the similarity judgments (Figure 1.5). Participants in both
language groups rated the likelihood in the following descending order: taxo-
nomic, thematic, same-classifier, and control (unrelated) items. The results
indicated that both Chinese and German speakers judged it more likely that
same-classifier items share an unknown property, X, with the target than that
control items do. At the same time, Chinese speakers gave higher likelihood
ratings than German speakers for the same-classifier items as well as for the
thematic items after adjusting for the difference in the control pairs.
Relation Ty
p
e
Chinese
German
Adjusted Score
FIGURE 1.5: Adjusted scores for property induction (on the blank property) for each
target type in Chinese and German speakers in Saalbach and Imai (2007).
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 29
4. Property Induction-Judgment with a Known (Concrete)
Property
Saalbach and Imai (2007) further examined whether people utilize classifier
relations in property inference even in a context in which they are able to
recruit some pieces of concrete background knowledge. Following a previous
study comparing taxonomic and thematic relations for the power supporting
inductive generalization (Lin & Murphy, 2001), “likelihood of carrying the
same bacteria” was used for the concrete property, because most people have
some knowledge—but not highly specific scientific knowledge—about bacte-
ria. Participants were asked, “How likely is it that [Object 1] and [Object 2]
carry the same bacteria?” and recorded their judgment on a rating scale of 1
( not likely at all ) to 7 ( very likely ).
This time, neither Chinese nor German speakers rated the same-classifier
item as having a higher probability than the control item in carrying the same
bacteria (Figure 1.6). The results indicated that, although both Chinese and
German participants noted the similarity of underlying classifier categories in
the similarity judgment task, neither group utilized this similarity in inductive
reasoning. Furthermore, the language-specific classifier effect observed in the
inference of a blank property was no longer found.
The results from the two inductive inference tasks suggest that, when
making an inductive inference from a completely unknown property, people
use similarity as a basis for inductive reasoning. Because classifier relations
influence Chinese speakers’ construal of similarity, they also influence Chinese
speakers’ inductive inferences when the speakers cannot access any other
Relation Ty
p
e
Chinese
German
Adjusted Score
FIGURE 1.6: Adjusted scores for property induction (on the “carrying the same bacteria”
question) for each target type in Chinese and German speakers in Saalbach and Imai (2007).
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30 Advances in Culture and Psychology
knowledge for inference. However, when Chinese speakers judged the
likelihood that two objects carry the same bacteria, they engaged in causal
reasoning by utilizing existing knowledge about the conditions in which bacte-
ria are likely to be found. That is, the participants judged that taxonomically
related objects were likely to carry the same bacteria, because things of the
same kind may provide similar conditions for supporting a certain kind of
bacteria (Lin & Murphy, 2001). Likewise, they judged that thematically related
objects were likely to carry the same bacteria because the transmission of bac-
teria depends on external contact among items that co-occur in space and
time. In contrast to taxonomic or thematic relations, Chinese as well as
German participants judged that the kind of similarity relation underlying
classifier category membership (e.g., shape similarity, size, rigidity, functional-
ity) would not heighten the likelihood of the two objects’ having the same
bacteria.
E. Development of Language-Specifi c Biases
Imai et al. (2010) further tested Chinese- and German-speaking preschool-age
children to see whether the classifier system in the Chinese language influ-
ences young children’s conceptual structure in nonlexical categorization and
inductive generalization of a property.
Twelve item sets, each consisting of four color drawings of familiar objects,
were prepared. Each set contained a target item (e.g., carrot), a taxonomic item
(e.g., tomato), a shape item (e.g., match), and a thematic item (e.g., rabbit). The
shape item belonged to the same classifier category as the target. In the non-
lexical categorization task, children were presented with the four items and
were asked to choose which of the three test items would best match the tar-
get. In the property induction task, they were shown a picture of the target
object and were told that the object had a particular novel property (e.g.,
“Idophome”). They were then shown the three test items and were asked to
choose the one that also would have the property.
The results again revealed a complex interplay between the effect of clas-
sifiers and task-specific biases that are shared across the two language/culture
groups. Here, as in the adult study by Saalbach and Imai (2007), we see some
support for the Whorfian hypothesis: Chinese preschoolers used classifier
relations as a basis for nonlexical categorization at a higher rate than German
preschoolers did. However, this cross-linguistic difference was not observed in
the property inference task. There, neither Chinese nor German children relied
on classifier relations (i.e., shape similarity) in generalizing a novel property to
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 31
other objects. Instead, both Chinese and German 5-year-olds generalized the
properties on the basis of taxonomic relations.
In contrast to the group differences with respect to the classifier effect,
Germans and Chinese children did not exhibit any difference in preference
for taxonomic versus thematic choices, something that would be predicted by
the culture-specific cognition hypothesis proposed by Nisbett and colleagues
(Ji et al., 2004; Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett et al., 2001). The fact that children
relied on taxonomic, thematic, or shape (same-classifier) relations differently
across three kinds of categorization contexts suggests that children’s catego-
rization behavior strongly depends on the task at hand rather than on a par-
ticular general conceptual preference (cf. Waxman & Namy, 1997). In other
words, even young children are aware of what kind of conceptual relations
should be recruited for a given task and are able to flexibly shift the basis for
categorization.
This result—that an influence from the classifier system is found only in
the nonlexical categorization task—is consistent with the results from previ-
ous research examining classifier influence in adults (Saalbach & Imai, 2007).
Like adults, children flexibly shift the basis for categorization according to the
task, and the influence of the classifier system is manifested differently across
different task contexts. In fact, the cross-linguistic/cultural similarity between
the Chinese and German children in nonlexical categorization and property
generalization tasks was striking. Any cognitive bias due to classifiers may be
too weak to stand up against the inherent or task-specific biases (e.g., shape
bias for label extension, taxonomic bias for property inference) that have been
identified across many different language/culture groups.
F. Summary: Language/Culture-Specifi c Cognitive
Processes Versus Task-Specifi c Processes
The overall pattern of the results reported by Saalbach and Imai (2007, 2011)
and by Imai et al. (2010) was strikingly similar across Chinese and German
speakers and across adults and children. In the two language/culture groups,
taxonomic and thematic relations both proved to be important conceptual
relations used by people to organize object concepts. The results also showed
that German speakers are sensitive to the similarity which results from the
semantic features that underlie classifier categories, but the magnitude of this
effect was larger for Chinese speakers, providing support for the Whorfian
hypothesis. However, it would be an overstatement, given this effect, to state
that Chinese and German speakers think differently , for two reasons. First, the
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32 Advances in Culture and Psychology
effect of classifier relations, when an effect was found (in similarity judgments
and in induction of a blank property), was much weaker than the effect of
taxonomic or thematic relations, even for Chinese speakers. Second, the clas-
sifier effect found in the blank property induction task diminished when par-
ticipants were able to access some background knowledge. A plausible conclu-
sion seems to be that the classifier categorization system does not serve as a
major organizer of the conceptual structure, nor does it play a major role in the
cognitive process in Chinese speakers. The language-specific classifier effect
found among Chinese speakers is perhaps best characterized as a magnified
sense of similarity through the habitual use of classifiers in association with
the names of objects. This further suggests that, if any evidence for the
Whorfian hypothesis is found, it is important to specify the magnitude and
scope of the effect within a larger picture of universally prominent tendencies
of cognition.
Regarding the issue of taxonomic versus thematic preference across East
Asians and Westerners (Ji et al., 2004; Nisbett, 2003), conclusions were simi-
lar to those for the classifier effect. Compared with Germans, Chinese partici-
pants gave thematic relations higher similarity ratings as well as higher likeli-
hood judgments in inductive inferences of an unknown property, which is
consistent with Ji et al.’s findings. However, this culture-specific preference
toward taxonomic or thematic relations was not observed in the inductive
inference of a concrete property (e.g., sharing the same bacteria). It is impor-
tant to note that thematic relations are important for Germans (Westerners),
just as taxonomic relations are important for Chinese (East Asians). Therefore,
even though Chinese participants exhibited a stronger preference for thematic
relations in similarity judgments than German participants did, the difference
was quantitative rather than qualitative.
Saalbach and Imai’s results (Imai et al., 2010; Saalbach & Imai, 2007,
2011) highlight the importance of examining the effect of given
language-specific categories (as well as the effect of culture) in a range of cog-
nitive tasks and of systematically comparing the size of that effect with to
those of other conceptual relations, because an effect may be observed in one
type of cognitive activity but not in others. The fact that the classifier effect
was obtained in the inductive reasoning task with a blank property but not in
the same task with a concrete property (sharing the same bacteria) suggests
that the influence of linguistic categories deeply interacts with task-specific
constraints, including the type of knowledge and cognitive processes required
for the task and the type of conceptual relations relevant for the task
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 33
(e.g., Smith, Shafir, & Osherson, 1993). In addition, the similarity underlying
two objects from the same (Chinese) classifier category was detected by
German speakers, even though they had no knowledge about Chinese classi-
fiers. This is consistent with the conclusion in section II that perceptual prop-
erties inherent in the world should also be considered when thinking about
universality and diversity in human cognition and concept structures.
Saalbach and Imai’s studies (Imai & Saalbach, 2010; Imai et al., 2010;
Saalbach & Imai, 2007, 2011) suggest that when we examine the influence of
language or culture, we should always consider how diversity in cognition that
arises from either language or culture is constrained by universal cognitive
dispositions and prior knowledge. These investigators also demonstrated that
the influence of culture and language can be tested separately when we limit
the scope of “language” and “culture” and define them clearly, and they further
suggested that language and culture can influence people’s cognitive processes
simultaneously. Therefore, it is necessary to reconsider the traditional
approach, which assumes the influence of language and culture to be contras-
tive and asks which of the two would be the one factor that shapes thought.
IV. LEARNING TO LABEL OBJECTS AND ACTIONS
(RESEARCH PROGRAM 3)
Until now, we have been discussing how language and culture may influence
people’s construal of entities and the conceptual relations between objects. In
the real world, however, objects are embedded in meaningful contexts. We see
things in action, and an action takes place in a scene. People move through
space or act on objects, and they talk about action events in language. In talk-
ing about events, we refer to objects and actions the object that acts, the
object that is acted upon, and the object in which the action takes place or
relations between objects. Objects are usually codified by nouns, and actions
are usually codified by verbs. In this section, we address whether and how
language (in this case, the grammatical properties of verbs) and culture affect
noun and verb learning in children.
In the lexical development literature, there has long been a debate con-
cerning the relative ease of noun and verb learning. Some researchers argue
that the learning of object labels (nouns) is universally privileged, compared
with the learning of action labels (verbs), because objects are conceptually
more concrete and tangible than actions (e.g., Gentner, 1982). Others argue
that the relative ease of learning nouns versus verbs depends on properties of
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the input language (see later discussion for details of linguistic properties)
(e.g., Gopnik & Choi, 1990; Tardif, 1996). The debate in effect revolves around
whether universal conceptual factors are more prominent than language-specific
linguistic properties or whether the opposite is true.
In addition to this debate, by referring to the finding that East Asians
(Japanese, Chinese, Koreans) are more likely than their Western counterparts
to be context sensitive (Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett &
Masuda, 2003), cultural psychologists have asked to what extent the context
sensitivity of East Asian children influences their noun and verb learning and
whether their learning speed is qualitatively different from that of
English-reared children.
The universalists predict that nouns are easier to learn than verbs equally
for East Asian and Western children, whereas relativists predict that verbs are
easier to learn for East Asian children than for Western children. To compre-
hensively examine this issue, and further to discuss how and to what extent
sensitivity to context influences children’s word learning, we introduce the
research of Imai et al. (2008) on the early language acquisition process.
Imai et al. (2008) compared East Asian children of two language groups—
Japanese and Chinese—with American children on a novel noun and verb
learning task. Japanese and Chinese were both included because these lan-
guage groups have very distinct linguistic properties, as described later. The
results give some support for the universal noun advantage position, because
3-year-old children of all three language groups easily learned novel object
labels but failed to learn novel action labels (verbs). However, a noteworthy
difference was found across the three language groups as well. The pattern of
results again suggests a complex interplay among universally shared cogni-
tive factors, linguistic factors, and possibly cultural factors, although the
influence of culture was not extremely strong and interacted with linguistic
properties.
A. Relative Ease of Verbs and Nouns
Languages differ in the relative salience of verbs and nouns (Gentner, 1982). In
English, for example, nouns tend to appear in salient positions (i.e., the first
and last positions in a sentence), whereas verbs are sandwiched between nouns.
In contrast, in languages such as Chinese, Korean, or Japanese, verbs are per-
ceptually more prominent than nouns because the subject and the object are
often dropped from a sentence in these languages. Some researchers maintain
that infants and children learning these languages are likely to hear verbs more
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 35
frequently than nouns in their caretakers’ speech (e.g., Choi & Gopnik, 1995;
Kim, McGregor, & Thompson, 2000; Ogura, 2001; Tardif, 1996).
Would these linguistic (syntactic) differences affect how children learn
nouns and verbs? Specifically, do Japanese-, Chinese-, or Korean-reared chil-
dren learn verbs more easily than nouns, and do they learn verbs more easily
than English-speaking children do? As mentioned earlier, the universalists
have argued that verb learning should be more difficult than noun learning
independent of the language children are learning, because verb meanings,
which refer to relations among objects, are inevitably more abstract and com-
plex than noun meanings (Gentner, 1982; Gleitman, 1990; cf. Haryu et al.,
2011; Imai et al., 2005; 2006). However, other researchers take a relativist
position, arguing that the relative ease of noun and verb learning depends on
the linguistic properties of the language the child learns (e.g., Choi & Gopnik,
1995; Tardif, 1996).
B. Culture Versus Language
To make the story even more complicated, cultural psychologists address
another research question in terms of the relationship between context sensi-
tivity and verb/noun learning. Members of East Asian cultures in general pay
closer and finer attention to relations between objects and context (Masuda &
Nisbett, 2001; Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett & Masuda, 2003). Therefore, caretakers
in East Asian culture should talk about relations among objects more often
than they do about objects. For example, Fernald and Morikawa (1993)
reported that, compared with American mothers, Japanese mothers had a
greater tendency to refer to the context and relations among toys when play-
ing with their children (see also Miller, Wiley, Fung, & Liang, 1997; Tardif,
Gelman, & Xu, 1999; Tardif, Shatz, & Naigles, 1997).
Based on the above findings, Nisbett (2003) addressed the possibility that
East Asians’ sensitivity to context might influence their noun and verb learn-
ing processes. However, how and to what degree it influences them has not
been fully hypothesized. In this regard, Imai et al. (2008) thought that com-
paring children who were learning English, Japanese, and Chinese could be
very informative, because these three languages differ from one another along
the two dimensions that have been assumed to affect the relative ease of verb
learning by children. The first dimension is whether the language allows omis-
sion of the subject or object nouns for the verb in a sentence (what is called
“argument dropping”). For example, in languages like Chinese or Japanese,
both the subject and the object of a verb can be dropped. On observing
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someone dropping a wallet, a Japanese speaker might say to him, “ Otoshi
(drop) mashita (polite-past),” a sentence in which the subject of the sentence,
anata (you), and the object, saifu (wallet), are both omitted. In English, in con-
trast, omission of nouns from a sentence is generally not allowed. Researchers
tend to assume that this characteristic of argument-dropping languages makes
verbs easier to learn, because not only will it make the verb perceptually more
salient in a sentence, it will also increase the frequency of verbs over nouns in
the input that children hear (Gentner, 1982; Tardif, 1996; cf. Li, Bates, &
MacWhinney, 1993). This dimension contrasts English on one end with
Japanese and Chinese on the other end.
The second dimension is the presence or absence of verbal morphology.
For example, in English, “ed” is added to a verb stem to make the past tense.
Thus, if an English speaker sees a novel word ending with “ed” (e.g., fepped ), he
or she would think that it is probably a verb. On this dimension, Chinese con-
trasts not only with English but also with Japanese. Verbs are inflected in both
English and Japanese, but not in Chinese; in other words, nouns and verbs are
not morphologically distinguished in Chinese (Erbaugh, 1992). Also, remem-
ber that in Chinese and Japanese, the subject and the object of a verb are often
dropped, and the verb alone can constitute a sentence. In Japanese, even when
a verb is produced without nouns, as in Mite (Look), X - teiru (X-ing), one can
tell that the word X is a verb by the “ teiru ” ending, which indicates that the
action is progressive. However, in Chinese, when a word is produced on its
own (and this can happen in a conversational discourse), it is difficult to tell
whether it is a noun or a verb. In other words, one can identify a novel Chinese
word as a verb only when it is embedded in a context. If a Chinese speaker
hears a novel word (e.g., tampa ) by itself, he or she would not know whether it
is a noun or a verb (see Li et al., 1993, for a discussion of how Chinese-speaking
adults determine grammatical classes of words and their thematic roles in sen-
tence processing).
C. Comparison of Chinese, Japanese, and English
in How Children Map and Extend Novel Nouns and
Verbs
Given these syntactic properties of English, Japanese, and Chinese, compari-
son of children from these three language groups should reveal whether it is
linguistic or cultural factors that influence early verb learning. Imai et al.
(2006; 2008) tested 3- and 5-year-old children learning Japanese, Mandarin
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 37
Chinese, or English as their ambient language. Six sets of video action events
served as stimulus materials. Each set consisted of a standard event and two
test events. In each standard event, a young woman is seen performing a novel
repetitive action with a novel object (e.g., a woman holds a brown plastic drain-
pipe in her right hand and pushes it outward with a punching motion). The
two test events were variants of the standard event. In one of the two test
events (Action-Same ‒ Object-Change), the same person did the same action,
but the object was replaced by another object that was distinctively different
from the standard (e,g., the woman is performing the same movement but
with a round metallic timer instead of a drainpipe). In the other test event
(Object-Same ‒ Action-Change), the theme object was the same but the action
was distinctively different from the action in the standard event (e.g., the
woman is holding the same plastic drainpipe in her right hand and tapping it
against her left shoulder).
While watching the standard event, a child heard either a novel noun or a
novel verb, depending on the condition. The child was then shown the two
test videos, and was asked to judge which of the two events the target word
should be applied to. Imai et al. (2008) expected that, if children understand
that a noun refers to an object and that the particular action in which the
object is used is irrelevant to the meaning of the noun, they would select the
same-object video when they heard a novel noun. In contrast, if they under-
stand that a verb maps to an action and that the agent and the object of the
action event are variables that can be changed across different instances of the
event, they would select the same-action event when hearing a novel verb.
The most important question is whether children from different language
groups would choose the “correct” video (i.e., the object-same video for the
noun condition and the action-same video for the verb condition) at equal
rates when learning novel nouns and verbs. If the universal noun advantage
view proposed by Gentner (1982) is correct, we may expect that children in all
three language groups will perform better in learning new nouns compared
with new verbs. On the other hand, if the relative ease of noun and verb learn-
ing is determined by distributional properties of the input language (Gopnik
& Choi, 1990; Tardif, 1996), we may expect that Japanese- and Chinese-
speaking children will do better than English-speaking children in learning
new verbs. However, even if we see this second pattern, an alternative inter-
pretation may also be possible. That is, it could be that Chinese and Japanese
children learn verbs more easily than American children because they can pay
attention to the relation between the objects (the actor and the object in this
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context) better than American children, who might tend to focus on the objects
per se rather than the relation between them. If this is the case, the verb-
learning advantage of Japanese and Chinese children might be attributed to
culture rather than language. It is possible to predict an entirely different out-
come, however. If morphological simplicity (i.e., the lack of verb suffixes as in
Chinese) affects the ease of verb learning (Tardif, 1996), Japanese children’s
performance might be more similar to that of English-reared children com-
pared with Chinese-reared children. If we see this pattern in the results, we
can attribute the group difference to language rather than to culture.
D. Universal Noun Advantage and Language-Specifi c
Delay in Verb Learning
1. Support for the Universal Noun Advantage View
In both age groups (i.e., 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds), children in all three lan-
guage groups were able to choose the Object-Same ‒ Action-Change event in
applying a novel noun, and there was no cross-linguistic or developmental dif-
ference. Therefore, 3-year-olds, regardless of the language they are learning,
have a clear understanding that nouns refer to objects and that specific action
in which the referent object is used are irrelevant to the meaning of the noun.
In contrast to their success in generalizing a novel noun to a different
scene including the same object, 3-year-olds failed to choose the Action-
Same ‒ Object-Change event when asked to apply a novel verb. Not until they
were 5 years old could children reliably extend a novel verb to an event involv-
ing the same action but a different object. In this sense, the results suggest
that learning a new verb is more difficult than learning a new noun, support-
ing Gentner’s (1982) universal noun advantage view.
2. Object Labeling Bias for Verbs in Chinese Children
With this overall pattern in mind, we should also note that the performance of
Japanese-, Chinese-, and English-speaking children was not uniform. In fact,
we found intriguing cross-linguistic differences in the pattern of novel verb
learning, and the pattern suggested that it is language rather than culture that
affects the difficulty children experience with verb learning.
Whereas English and Japanese 5-year-olds were highly successful in gen-
eralizing the newly learned verb to the same action in the face of the object
change, Chinese 5-year-olds mapped the novel verb to the same-object event
(the one in which the actor was performing a different action), suggesting that
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 39
they interpreted the novel word as an object name even if the word was unam-
biguously presented as a verb.
Thus far, the results suggest that Chinese children as old as 5 years of age
could not apply newly taught verbs to the same action when the object was
changed. Why was verb generalization so difficult for Chinese children? It
could be because the lack of morphological distinction between nouns and
verbs made it difficult for Chinese children to map a novel word to the action
component of the event. At the same time, there must be conditions under
which Chinese preschoolers, especially 5-year-olds, can extend novel verbs to
the action in the action-same condition. But what kind of cue do they need in
addition to linguistic cues? Imai et al. (2008) suspected that the difficulty in
identifying a word’s grammatical form class solely from word forms might
have led Chinese children to rely heavily on contextual cues that reside outside
of language.
3. Sensitivity to Contextual Cues in Chinese Children
One property of the experimental stimuli may have given Chinese children a
cue that the object was what should be attended to in the event. The standard
video clips were crafted in such a way that the actor holds the object for about
half a second before the action starts. This manipulation was done to make
sure that children see the object clearly. The object was not unnaturally high-
lighted in the original stimuli, and it did not affect Japanese- or English- speak-
ing children. However, if Chinese children were exceptionally sensitive to situ-
ational cues because cues residing in language are harder to access, this first
segment of the video might have led Chinese children to think that the object
was topicalized in some way.
To test this possibility, Imai et al. (2008) removed the segment of the
video clip in which the actor was holding the object. In the new video, the
object is already in motion at the very start of the event presentation. This
manipulation indeed brought about a drastic change in Chinese children’s per-
formance in the verb learning task. Their performance was now equivalent to
the level of performance by Japanese- or English-speaking children.
Importantly, when Japanese- and English-speaking children were tested
again with these videos, their performance was not affected by the manipula-
tion. Further, Chinese children were tested again on the noun condition using
the revised stimuli, and the results confirmed that they had no problem in
applying a noun to the same object test. Therefore, it was not the case that
Chinese children mapped the novel word simply to the most salient component
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of the event, whether it was a noun or a verb. They were able to extend a novel
verb to the same action only when the action was maximally salient, but even
under this condition (i.e., when the action was more salient than the object),
they had no problem in mapping a novel noun to the object.
Taken together, the results show that Chinese 5-year-olds can extend
novel verbs to the same action with a different object, but they need support
from contextual or perceptual cues. When contextual cues are in conflict with
linguistic cues, it appears that Chinese preschoolers rely more heavily on the
former than on the latter, unlike Japanese- or English-speaking children. It is
likely that the lack of obvious morphological distinction between nouns and
verbs leads Chinese children to be more attentive to objects and that they
require stronger contextual cues in order to modify this object bias.
E. Summary
To summarize, the research program presented in this section supported the
universalist position at a global level, but again, this did not mean that there
was no influence of language or culture. On the contrary, there was a marked
difference across Chinese-, Japanese-, and English-speaking children in the
degree of difficulty they experienced and in the cues they used in learning
novel verbs. Importantly, even though there was an influence of language
here, it was not the pattern predicted by Tardif (1996), who emphasized the
distributional characteristics of the Chinese (as well as Japanese) language.
The results of Imai et al.’s 2008 study provide important insights regard-
ing universality and diversity of cognition, as well as the relation between cul-
ture and language in explaining diversity across different language/cultural
groups. First, just as in the cases discussed in sections II and III, the results
suggest both universality and diversity. Early word learning takes place within
a dynamic interaction among children’s universal cognitive disposition, the
distributional and syntactic properties of the language they are learning, and
the nature of the concepts (e.g., degree of abstractness, complexity of mean-
ing, perceptual accessibility) denoted by the words they are learning. In this
interaction, the relative dominance among these factors seems to be hierarchi-
cally ordered. Based on the pattern of results in the word learning literature, it
is probable that conceptual factors take precedence over linguistic factors. It
has been repeatedly observed that, across different languages, children learn
labels of objects more readily and more easily than they do labels of actions,
and they generalize nouns more willingly than verbs. Linguistic factors, either
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 41
structural or distributional, also do affect word learning, but not to the degree
that they can override conceptual constraints.
It is difficult to determine a priori what linguistic properties affect verb
learning and how they do so. For example, researchers have long assumed that
the existence of argument dropping would make a language advantageous for
verb learning because it makes verbs perceptually more salient and more fre-
quent in the ambient language (e.g., Gentner, 1982; Tardif, 1996). However,
the fact that English-speaking and Japanese-speaking children showed similar
performance whereas Chinese children behaved differently in learning novel
verbs suggests that frequency and perceptual saliency of verbs alone may not
be the dominant factor in determining the ease of verb learning. A lack of
morphology that clearly distinguishes verbs from nouns has also been assumed
to reduce the burden for children in learning verbs (Gentner, 1982; Tardif,
1996). However, this was clearly not the case, because, under a default situa-
tion in which no additional contextual scaffolding was provided, it was Chinese
children who experienced more difficulty in verb extension compared with
their English- or Japanese-speaking age-mates.
The cultural framework advocated by Nisbett and colleagues (e.g., Nisbett,
2003)—that East Asians are relation oriented and Westerners are object ori-
ented—seems not to extend to the verb and noun learning process, at least
superficially. However, caution is necessary in interpreting this result, because
Chinese children’s high sensitivity to the contextual cue (i.e., the segment in
which the actor holds the object before starting the action) is consistent with
the prediction by cultural psychologists (e.g., Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett & Masuda,
2003; Norenzayan, Choi, & Peng, 2007). The question is why this was seen
only in Chinese but not in Japanese children.
We can only speculate on the reason Chinese children were so sensitive to
contextual cues, even to the extent that linguistic cues (word-order cues and
postverbal particles) that were apparent to Chinese-speaking adults were
bluntly overridden. To identify the grammatical class of each word in the sen-
tence and assign a thematic role to it, Chinese speakers have to coordinate
semantic, syntactic, semimorphological grammatical cues such as aspect
markers, object markers, and passive markers in “a complex system of mutual
constraints” (Li et al., 1993, p. 190). This linguistic property may lead Chinese
children to rely more on contextual cues residing outside of language than on
linguistic cues in novel word learning.
This sensitivity to contextual cues could well be shared by Japanese chil-
dren. However, because linguistic cues are salient in Japanese, these children
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42 Advances in Culture and Psychology
may not need to pay attention to this subtle contextual cue in this particular
task. In any case, the difference in sensitivity to the contextual cue in Imai et
al.’s (2008) research indicates the possibility that the influences of language
(i.e., the structural and distributional properties of a language) interact with a
culture-specific attentional bias and suggests a complex interaction among
cognitive, linguistic, and cultural factors.
V. LANGUAGE-SPECIFIC LEXICALIZATION
PATTERNS, CULTURE, AND ATTENTION TO
BACKGROUND (RESEARCH PROGRAM 4)
In section IV, we discussed how grammatical aspects of language, especially
argument dropping and morphological simplicity of verbs, interacted with
universally shared conceptual factors in noun and verb learning in children. In
this section, we examine how another aspect of language—which semantic
information is likely to be coded in words—affects perception and attention
of motion events. In particular, we discuss (1) how universally shared atten-
tion to motion scenes changes into language-specific ways of packaging infor-
mation when learning novel verbs and (2) how language- and cultural- specific
ways of codifying events independently or interactively influence attention to
motion events in nonverbal contexts.
A. Differences in How Languages Codify Action
Events
The ways in which different languages codify actions are very diverse, perhaps
even more diverse than the ways in which they codify objects (Gentner, 1982;
Talmy, 1986). For example, Germanic languages, including English and German,
tend to encode (lexicalize) the manner of the action in the meaning of a verb (e.g.,
limp, swagger, march), while expressing the path of the motion (e.g., in, out, up,
down) in a prepositional phrase (preposition + noun). Romance languages such
as French, Spanish, and Italian tend to include the path information in the main
verb (e.g., entr ó , “enter”; sali ó , “move out”; pas ó , “move through”). Here, the man-
ner of the action is optionally encoded outside the verb (usually by an adverb),
and this information is often left out. For example, in Spanish, the English expres-
sion, “The bottle floated into the cave” is codified as “ La (the) botella (bottle) entr ó
(MOVED-IN) a (to) la (the) cuvea (cave) flotando (floating).”
Some other languages, such as Japanese and Korean, encode the ground
information—the property of the background in which the action takes
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 43
place—in the meaning of some verbs. For example, Japanese encodes the spa-
tial configuration of the ground being traversed: Wataru , “go across,” implies
that someone crosses a flat barrier (such as a road or railway track) that comes
between two points, whereas touru , “move through,” implies crossing a place
that is continuous from the starting point and the end point of the motion
(Muehleisen & Imai, 1997). So, when English speakers would simply say, “She
went across the railroad track (or the tennis court),” Japanese speakers would
use two different verbs in describing the two situations: “ Kanojo (she) wa (top-
ic-marking particle) senro (railroad track) wo (object-marking particle) watat-ta
(go across-Past)” and “ Kanojo (she) wa (topic-marking particle) tenisu kooto
(tennis court) wo (object-marking particle) toot-te (moving through) it-ta
(go-Past).”
B. Language-Specifi c Lexicalization Patterns and
How People Encode Aspects of Action Events When
Speaking
Would the differences in the lexicalization of action events lead to differences
in how people selectively codify an action event in language? Previous research
demonstrates that that is indeed the case. For example, when describing short
motion event clips (e.g., a boy crawling up a low hill, a girl jumping into a pool),
English speakers produced 18 times more manner verbs than path verbs
(Naigles, Eisenberg, Kako, Highter, & McGraw, 1998). A recent study by
Maguire et al. (2010) presented English-, Japanese-, and Spanish-speaking
children with a video clip of a starfish moving along a particular path in a par-
ticular manner and labeled the action in the children’s own language. The chil-
dren were then shown two variants of the original clip—one showing the
same starfish moving along the same path but in a different manner, and the
other showing the starfish moving in the same manner but on a different
path—and were asked to which video the verb should be applied. Before age 3,
children of all three language groups mapped the verb to the path, generalizing
the newly taught verb to the same-path event. By age 3 and beyond, however,
they manifested language-specific patterns in interpreting the meaning of
novel verbs; that is, English-speaking children were more likely than Spanish-
and Japanese-speaking children to interpret the novel verb as expressing the
manner rather than the path of the motion.
Perhaps infants initially and universally extract the same information
from the events that they witness and map a label to it. Here, they seemed to
naturally pay more attention to the path of motion rather than the manner
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44 Advances in Culture and Psychology
and to think that a novel word codified path, independent of the lexicalization
pattern of the language they were learning. However, once children are exposed
to a particular language for some time, they start to attend differentially to the
semantic components of events that are highlighted in their language.
C. Attention to Action Events: Universally
Shared Event Components and Emergence of
Language-Specifi c Attention
From the Whorfian perspective, it is extremely interesting to ask whether the
differences in the lexicalization patterns just discussed lead speakers of English
and speakers of Japanese to perceive action/motion events differently. More
specifically, would the differential attention to the components of action
events when using language lead to differential attention to an action scene,
even when language is not invoked? If the answer is yes, when and how does
this phenomenon start?
To address these questions, G ö ksun et al. (2011) asked whether and how
Japanese- and English-reared infants perceive figures (actors) and grounds
(backgrounds) in events, and how this perception might be modified when chil-
dren start learning their native language, using a novelty-detection preferential
looking paradigm. In each language group, 14- and 19-month-olds were famil-
iarized with a single motion event in which an actor was seen moving across a
particular field (e.g., crossing a tennis court). In the test, they were simultane-
ously shown the original scene and a new scene, in which either the actor or the
background through which the actor moved was changed. If infants are able to
detect a change in figures or grounds in events, they should prefer to watch the
novel figure or ground, showing longer looking time for the changed scene com-
pared with the original scene with which they have become familiar.
The results indicated that 14-month-olds in both the English and Japanese
groups noticed changes in figures and grounds in dynamic events, looking lon-
ger at the novel (changed) scene than at the scene to which they had been
familiarized during the training session. In other words, infants of this age
were sensitive to the categorical ground distinctions for crossing action (e.g.,
crossing a tennis court vs. crossing a railroad track) in dynamic events.
However, by 19 months, this early sensitivity to categorical ground distinc-
tions was lost for children reared in the English environment, whereas chil-
dren reared in the Japanese environment preserved these distinctions, sug-
gesting that the process of learning language shifts the categorical boundaries
the infants originally possessed before language learning. These results
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 45
suggest that infants originally parse nonlinguistic dynamic events into the
various nonlinguistic event components that are codified across different lan-
guages of the world and attend to all of them regardless of their native lan-
guage. Then, as children learn how these event components are lexicalized in
their native language, they appear to focus on certain semantic distinctions
over others, and, thus influenced by the ambient language, they lose the finely
tuned attention they originally possessed.
These findings may be thought of as analogous to the restructuring of
phonological categories found in younger infants: Infants start out with the
universal phonological categories, but by their first birthday, they stop paying
attention to fine phonological details that their native language does not dis-
tinguish (e.g., Eimas, Miller, & Jusczyk, 1987; Kuhl, Andruski, Chistovich,
Chistovich, Kozhevnikova, & Ryskina, 1997; Werker & Tees, 1984). There
might be a broad set of foundational components in events that will later be
collapsed by attending to only the subset that is coded in one’s native lan-
guage. As children learn their native language, they might semantically reorga-
nize their prelinguistic constructs, either by dividing the category or by creat-
ing a broader category (for details of this argument, see G ö ksun, Hirsh-Pasek,
& Golinkoff, 2010; see also Hespos & Spelke, 2007).
D. Alternative Interpretation: Infl uence From Culture
Here again, however, an alternative interpretation could be proposed from cul-
tural psychology. People often have difficulty detecting obvious changes in a
scene when two pictures are presented sequentially (change blindness) (Simons
& Levine, 1997); nevertheless, cross-cultural differences in sensitivity to
changes in scenes have been reported (Chua, Boland, & Nisbett, 2005; Masuda
& Nisbett, 2001, 2006).
When Masuda and Nisbett (2001) presented an underwater scene to
American and Japanese adults, the Japanese speakers not only expressed more
relationships between the focal figure (e.g., a fish) and the background but also
were more likely to describe the background and to describe it in greater detail.
In another study, using the change blindness paradigm (i.e., failure to detect the
changes in a scene), Masuda and Nisbett (2006) displayed two animated scenes
(e.g., a farm) that differed in small details. American adults detected changes in
the focal objects, but Japanese adults noticed changes in the background.
Therefore, it is possible that the loss of sensitivity to ground change in
19-month-old English-speaking children could be explained in light of American
children’s development of a culture-specific mode of event construal. In other
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words, decreased sensitivity to the ground change could have arisen in the course
of developing attention only to focal objects. With the current sets of evidence,
we cannot disambiguate these two interpretations. However, it is also possible
that the influence of culture and language is closely coupled, in which case it
would not be feasible to try to separate the two, especially when we broaden the
definition of “language” and the scope of what we consider to be its influence. As
mentioned earlier, Masuda and Nisbett (2001) found that American adults
(English speakers) and Japanese adults described an event differently: English
speakers tended to talk about the focal objects without mentioning the back-
ground in the scene, whereas Japanese adults mentioned the background infor-
mation or how the focal objects were situated in the background. This issue is
explored further in the concluding section of this chapter (section VI).
VI. THEORETICAL IMPLICATIONS AND FUTURE
DIRECTIONS FOR RESEARCH ON UNIVERSALITY
AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY
A. Summary and Theoretical Implications: Relation
Between Language, Culture, and Thought
We have reviewed research investigating universality and diversity (language
or culture specificity) of cognition, focusing on four domains: (1) how we con-
strue entities and classify them as objects or substances; (2) how we utilize
and weigh three types of conceptual relations—taxonomic relations, thematic
relations, and classifier relations—when engaging in cognitive tasks; (3) how
we map objects and actions onto nouns and verbs and how we generalize the
meanings of novel nouns and verbs; and (4) how we talk about action events
and how language-specific lexicalization patterns are related to attention to
the objects and the background of action scenes. In all four series of research
programs, these questions were addressed not only in light of cross-linguistic
comparison but also from a developmental perspective.
The four series of programs converged onto the conclusion that a simple
pro-Whorfian versus anti-Whorfian (or a language vs. culture) dichotomy is
inadequate. A complex interplay among various factors—including universal
cognitive constraints, perceptual affordance provided from the world,
task-specific constraints, language-specific biases, and culture-specific cogni-
tive styles—must be considered in order to account for people’s behavior in a
given cognitive task. This provides important implications for the field of lan-
guage and thought, as well as for the field of cultural psychology.
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In the traditional discussions of the Whorfian hypothesis, demonstration
of a cross-linguistic difference between a language with a certain lexical or gram-
matical categorization system and one without it in any task , be it similarity
judgments, categorization, memory, or inductive reasoning, has been taken as
evidence for the hypothesis. Likewise, the finding of a cross-cultural difference
that is consistent with a hypothesis about cultural influence in a particular task
has been taken as evidence for the hypothesis. However, in most cases, the scope
of the effect within a global picture of cognition has not been explicitly specified.
The results of the four series of studies reviewed in this chapter all suggest that
the influence of linguistic categories (or culture) deeply interacts with univer-
sally shared cognitive or perceptual dispositions and task-specific cognitive con-
straints and that language and culture may also interact with one another. This
in turn highlights the importance of examining the influence of language (or
culture) — not in light of whether there is an influence but how large and mean-
ingful the influence is within a broad range of cognitive processes (Imai &
Saalbach, 2010; Imai et al., 2010; Saalbach & Imai, 2007, 2011).
In fact, in all of the four domains, the behavior of both adults and children
was strikingly similar at a global level but diverged at a finer level. In the domain
of object–substance distinction, both English- and Japanese-speaking children
appreciated the ontological distinction between object kinds and substance
kinds and generalized a novel label according to the appropriate ontological
constraints (i.e., objects by shape, substances by material). But they differed in
the object–substance construal of perceptually ambiguous entities (such as a
kidney-shaped piece of paraffin) that could be construed as either an object or
a substance. When the influence of the classifier system was examined, speak-
ers (both children and adults) of a classifier language (Chinese) and those of a
nonclassifier language (German) were very similar in that the relative order of
preference for taxonomic, thematic, and classifier relations was the same across
categorization, similarity judgments, and property inference tasks. Yet, in the
similarity judgment task, Chinese speakers showed stronger sensitivity than
German speakers to the same-classifier relation. In inferring the meaning of a
novel noun and novel verb associated with an action event, Japanese-, Chinese-
and English-reared children all experienced difficulty in extending verbs com-
pared with nouns, in spite of large differences across the three languages with
respect to availability of verbal morphology and frequency of verb use in the
discourse. Yet, these children differed in what cues they needed in order to infer
the meaning of novel verbs. In perceiving and verbalizing motion events, young
children’s initial verb meanings were greatly similar across languages that
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48 Advances in Culture and Psychology
lexicalize event components very differently. Infants raised in both Japanese
and English environments were originally sensitive to the background (as well
as the actor) of motion events, whether or not their ambient language encoded
such components. But their attention patterns diverged as a result of assimilat-
ing to the dominant lexicalization pattern in their mother tongue (or to the
culture-specific mode of attending to the world).
These findings indicate that people (both children and adults) share uni-
versal conceptual structures and basic cognitive functions that are likely to
have arisen from the interaction between factors residing out in the world
(e.g., perceptual similarities that the world presents to all humans [Rosch,
1978]) and factors residing within humans (e.g., cognitive biases that hold
stable across different linguistic and cultural experiences). However, this does
not mean that there is no room for language or culture to modulate cognition
and conceptual structures. Language and culture highlight certain aspects of
the world or give us bases for categorization when there are no perceptible
divisions (as is the case with spatial relations). More importantly, the relation
between language (or culture) and thought is not unidirectional; linguistic cat-
egories reflect universally perceived commonalities in the world, but at the
same time they modify universally perceived similarities (see Imai & Mazuka,
2003; 2007; see also Malt, 1995, for a relevant discussion).
The four series of studies reviewed in this chapter shed light on how and
when we start to see divergence in concepts and cognition in the course of
development. Children start out with fine-grained attention to conceptual dis-
tinctions but become sensitive to language-specific or culture-specific concep-
tual or perceptual divisions surprisingly early, although the specific timing
may vary across different conceptual domains. In all of the four conceptual
domains reviewed, children manifested sensitivity to language/culture-spe-
cific patterns at 3 years of age or earlier. English-speaking children started to
exhibit the object-construal bias for simple-shaped solid substances as early as
24 months. They also showed dampened attention to the background (possi-
bly due to increased attention to the actor or the figure object) at 19 months.
B. Culture and Language Revisited for
Understanding the Nature of Human Concepts
and Cognitive Processes
The four series of studies presented in this chapter dealt with specific linguis-
tic categories (count/mass grammar, classifier grammar) or structural proper-
ties (e.g., argument dropping vs. compulsory arguments) that function at a
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 49
local level. In this narrowly (but hence clearly) defined scope of language func-
tions, we have contrasted the influence of language with that of culture and
asked which of them should be more prominent, with the assumption that the
two are cleanly separable.
However, we acknowledge that language cannot be regarded as more than
just a system of words and rules; it can be broadly defined as a framework for
activities in a given language community (Chiu et al., 2007). In fact, language
is a medium through which people in a speech community construct what
researchers variously call “narratives” (Bruner, 1990; Kashima, Peters, &
Whelan, 2008), “meaning systems” (Geertz, 1973; Shweder, 1991), “shared
representations” (Latan é , 1996; Sperber, 1996), “social reality” (Bruner, 1957),
“group norms” (Sherif, 1936), “cultural worldviews” (Nisbett, 2003; Nisbett &
Masuda, 2003; Nisbett et al., 2001), “self-construals” (Markus & Kitayama,
1991), and “domain-general interpretive concepts” (Kashima, 2009). In the
following sections, we explore how culture and language (as a whole rather
than specific aspects or functions) mutually depend on one another and con-
jointly affect cognition.
1. Cultural World View May Affect Language Use and Discourse
Construction
As discussed earlier, Masuda and Nisbett (2001) reported that Americans and
Japanese described ocean scenes differently, in ways consistent with what was
predicted by the culture-specific cognition (i.e., attention) hypothesis. Along
the same line, Maass, Karasawa, Politi, and Suga (2006) argued that Eastern
and Western cultural differences are reflected in language use. Adjectives
describe properties or traits of objects. Verb phrases, in contrast, “provide
greater information about the context and/or the relationship between sub-
ject and object” (p. 735). Westerners tend to talk about what individuals are
like , describing individuals’ traits. As a consequence, they tend to use adjec-
tives more frequently than verbs. Members of East Asian cultures prefer to
talk about what people do , reflecting their concern for relations between peo-
ple, or between people and the world, which leads to greater use of verbs.
Because of their holistic worldview, East Asians may also tend to focus on
vocal tone rather than the content of utterances. For example, using the Stroop
interference task, Ishii and her colleagues (Ishii & Kitayama, 2002; Ishii, Reyes,
& Kitayama, 2003; Kitayama & Ishii, 2002) asked Japanese and English speak-
ers to focus on either vocal tone (context) or meaning (content) of emotional
words. Overall, the results indicated that when the vocal tone of an utterance
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50 Advances in Culture and Psychology
was incongruent with its verbal content (e.g., when positive words such as
happy were uttered with a negative intonation), Japanese speakers had greater
difficulty ignoring the vocal tone than did English speakers, and English speak-
ers had more difficulty ignoring the verbal content.
2. Mutual Dependence of Culture and Language
These studies suggest that culture and language are deeply related, especially
when we define language broadly as a medium for communicating and for
constructing shared understanding, as sociocultural psychologists do.
Sociocultural psychologists tend to see culture as the cause and language use
as the consequence. However, discourse style is definitely within the realm of
language, and acquisition of language must include acquisition of the cultur-
ally appropriate discourse style or mode of communication (Chiu et al., 2007).
From a Whorfian perspective, one could argue that acquisition of a
language-specific communication style shapes children’s attention to the ele-
ments of scenes in culture-specific ways.
Furthermore, as we have discussed, the cause and consequence might not
be unidirectional: Culture and language may constitute an inseparable body
and influence mental processes conjointly. For example, in a study that tar-
geted 29 languages, Kashima and Kashima (1998) investigated the relation-
ships between the level of individualism in a language community and the
pragmatic leniency of the pronoun drop. They found a negative correlation
between these variables: The more a language community values individual-
ism, the less it allows the omission of pronouns, even when the pronouns can
be inferred. The researchers speculated that, because pronouns function as
identifiers of agents in the discourse, the strict use of pronouns in a given
language forces speakers to differentiate themselves from others, which in
turn results in individualistic thought in the society. But it is also possible to
speculate that the reverse is true, that individualistic values lead members of a
language community to become pragmatically less lenient regarding pronoun
drops.
Mutual dependence between culture and language may also be seen in the
use of honorific systems. Relatively speaking, 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.
For example, when asked to convey a message, Koreans were more likely than
Americans to change their communication style according to the conversation
partner’s social status, whereas Americans were more likely than Koreans to
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The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts 51
change their communication style according to type of information, such as
positive versus negative messages or easy versus difficult requests (Ambady,
Koo, Lee, & Rosenthal, 1996; Holtgraves & Yang, 1992; the same issue is
tested by Miyamoto, Nisbett, & Masuda, 2006). Perhaps such advanced sys-
tems of honorific expressions in the vocabulary and pragmatics of a given lan-
guage conjointly constitute the hierarchy-oriented meaning systems shared by
people in East Asian cultures. That is, East Asians institutionalize a complex
list of honorific rules because of their cultural worldview, but this worldview is
also facilitated and maintained by the institutionalized honorific rules of their
languages.
Considering all of these issues together, it might not be highly productive
to try to contrast the magnitude of language effect versus cultural effect. To
advance our scientific understanding of the human mind, it might be more
worthwhile to postulate that language (in its broader sense) and culture are
mutually dependent on each other and that together they influence human
mental processes.
That said, we are not arguing that language should always be treated con-
jointly with culture and investigated at a global level. In some cases, it is pos-
sible to separate the influence of culture and language, as we have shown in
the review of our research, and this provides useful insights into how language
and culture are conjointly and separately related to thought.
VII. CONCLUSION
In conclusion, what is most needed in the field is communication between the
disciplines of cognitive psychology and cultural psychology. On the one hand,
cognitive psychologists or psycholinguists rarely consider the influence of cul-
ture when they find an effect of “language” in a linguistic category, or when the
effect could be closely or inseparably coupled with culture. On the other hand,
sociocultural psychologists often use the term language (and also culture )
vaguely, making it difficult to pin down whether it is really language that is
responsible for the differences between groups. Worse still, the two groups of
researchers often do not realize that they are using different senses of the
word language . It is important to investigate the relation between language
and cognition at different levels, but with clear specification of what is meant
by “language” and whether language is separable from culture in the particular
investigation at hand. Researchers should also specify the scope of the influ-
ence of language or culture, or both, before generalizing the effect they have
found with a particular task in a particular domain to either language or
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52 Advances in Culture and Psychology
culture. Lastly, we should acknowledge that human cognition is not simply
universal or simply diverse. Future research needs to specify how cognitive
diversity is constrained by language, culture, universal biases within humans,
and natural clusterings within the world, and how these factors interact with
one another.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The first author (Imai) is grateful for all of her collaborators who have contrib-
uted enormously to conduct the research programs reviewed in this chapter.
Among them, she especially thanks Henrik Saalbach, Dedre Gentner, Kathy
Hirsh-Pasek, Roberta Golinkoff, Etsuko Haryu, and Hiroyuki Okada for help-
ing her to cultivate the ideas, views, and conclusions addressed here. The sec-
ond author (Masuda) thanks members of the Culture and Cognition Lab at
the University of Alberta for their assistance. We also thank our funding agen-
cies: MEXT KAKENHI (#15300088, #22243043, #23120003) for Imai, MEXT
GCOE program to Keio University, and the Social Sciences and Humanities
Research Council of Canada (410-2010-0720) for Masuda.
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