ABSTRACT
The question of whether language influences thought or not has been much discussed and disputed in the cognitive science literature. A recent proposal by Lakoff and Johnson (1999) adds an interesting slant to this debate by arguing that although language can influence thought via conceptual metaphors, the overall shape of the human conceptual system is determined by its embodied, perceptual nature. In this way, language is ultimately the slave of thought.
We present an experiment aimed at exploring this question empirically. Exploiting evidence that has shown that schema consistent priming can bias the outcome of reasoning tasks, we performed a study in a well mapped conceptual domain in order to examine whether embodied experience or language is the greater determinant of conceptual inferences. In this study, we found that language, rather than thought, is maybe what counts.
