The claim that crosslinguistic disparities foster differences in nonlinguistic thought often
referred to as 'linguistic relativity' has for some time been the subject of intense debate.
For much of that time the debate was not informed by much experimental work. Recently however
there has been an explosion of research on linguistic relativity carried out by numerous
scholars interested in the interaction between language and nonlinguistic cognition. This book
surveys the rapidly accruing research on this topic much of it carried out in the last decade.
Structured so as to be accessible to students and scholars in linguistics psychology and
anthropology it first introduces crucial concepts in the study of language and cognition. It
then explores the relevant experimentally oriented research focusing independently on the
evidence for relativistic effects in spatial orientation temporal perception number
recognition color discrimination object substance categorization gender construal as well
as other facets of cognition. This is the only book to extensively survey the recent work on
linguistic relativity and should serve as a critical resource for those concerned with the
topic.
