ABSTRACT
Although psychologists agree that people use language to categorize and describe their experience, there is considerably less agreement about whether the language people use also affects the way they come to know and represent this experience. Study of the relation of language and cognition has had a long and somewhat checkered history in psychology (Brown, 1976; Glucksberg, 1988; Hunt & Agnoli, 1991). Perhaps the most controversial view is incorporated in what has come to be known as the linguistic relativity, or Sapir-Whorf, hypothesis, which holds that the grammatical structures of markedly different languages cause their speakers to experience and mentally represent the world in markedly different ways. As Whorf (1956, pp. 213–214) put it:
The world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.
