ABSTRACT
F or more than 50 years, philosophers, psychologists, linguists, and anthro-pologists have debated the relationship between culture, language, and the mind (our mental representation of the experienced world). Researchers have considered both whether cognition is affected by differences in the content of communication across different speech communities (what people choose to talk about) and whether it is affected by the structure of language itself (how the content is communicated). Moreover, differences at the level of either structure (e.g., whether verbs carry information about tense, whether objects are assigned grammatical gender) or content (whether a language has words for shame, democracy, or purple) might have either an acute online inuence on cognition-just in the act of “thinking for speaking” (Slobin, 1996)—or a deeper, more profound, chronic inuence on what an individual is able to think about.
