Language and Thought

Languages vary tremendously in how they allow us to express ourselves. In some languages, you have to say when an event happened (past, present, future, etc.), while in others it is obligatory to say how you know about the event (you saw it, you heard about it), or what genders its participants were. In addition, languages just feel different from one another - some feel poetic while others feel brutal. Some things just don't sound right in certain languages, and some translations are harder than others to pull off. But are these differences meaningful? Do differences across languages cause substantive changes in the cognition of their speakers? We'll read some of the burgeoning research literature on these questions and consider how they can be answered with new empirical tools.