Spatial Language

When people say that language and thought are intimately related, they
are right. At bottom, the meanings that are expressed by languages must
in some way reflect conceptual entities and relationships that are important
in human cognition. Foundational concepts—such as space—allow
us to talk about the world around us and our experiences in it, and
spatial language must have evolved so that we can do so. In this sense,
spatial language must reflect aspects of our spatial knowledge, following
its skeletal structure. Perhaps more controversial is the question of what
effect language has on thought. Language is a powerful representational
medium that is acquired early in life and, indeed, is the major medium
by which we communicate our knowledge to others. However, many
have further speculated that the power of language may go beyond
mere communication of knowledge: it might actually change the way we
think, either by allowing only certain concepts to be expressed or, more
extremely, by modulating the form and/or content of our knowledge.
The latter hypothesis is consistent with the conclusion reached by Benjamin
Lee Whorf (1956), who suggested that because of the intimate relationship
between language and thought, speakers of different languages
would have different ways of conceptualizing the world (see Lee 1996).
In this chapter, we will be considering the hypothesis that language
affects thought in the context of one domain: spatial knowledge. Applied
to this domain, the hypothesis predicts that learning how one’s language
encodes space should permanently alter the nature of one’s spatial
thought. More specifically, we will consider the hypothesis that the foundational nonlinguistic spatial representations upon which the language
of space stand will be permanently changed.