ABSTRACT
Languages differ markedly in their grammars, suggesting different design solutions to constraints of a socio-historical and cognitive nature rather than permutations of a fixed universal grammar (Evans & Levinson, 2009). Different languages direct attention to different aspects of events (Slobin, 2004) and help shape our perceptions of fundamental properties of our worlds (Whorf, 1956) such as the sense of ourselves in space (Levinson, Kita, Haun, & Rasch, 2002) and our perceptions of the color of objects (Tan et al., 2008; Thierry, Athanasopoulos, Wiggetta, Deringa, & Kuipers, 2009). It is true that blocking the use of language may eliminate such effects (e.g., Winawer et al., 2007) but in everyday life we experience the world as beings who do use language-we talk to ourselves, we talk to others, and we use language to guide our actions (Vygotsky, 1960).
