ABSTRACT
T his chapter addresses the classic puzzle of the relationship between lan-guage and cognition from a social psychological point of view. The two central questions driving this field are as follows: Does language influence, shape, or perhaps even determine human cognitive activities?’ For the flip side of the coin, do cognitive processes affect language? This classic problem has occupied a prominent position in human intellectual history and has an intellectual heritage that was shaped by a number of eminent scholars (e.g., Boas, 1949; Sapir, 1951; von Humboldt, 1843; Whorf, 1956). This question has also featured in social psychology, increasingly so over the last 10 to 20 years, largely due to the formulation of language-related research questions that made the language-cognition interface more amenable to systematic investigation.
