Bilingual Cognition Sources

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Any grammatical theory that purports to account for human linguistic competence must also be able to account for bilingual competence and the associated performance (Stenson, 1990, 194)

Carruthers, P. The cognitive functions of language
BBS 2002 http://www.bbsonline.org/Preprints/Carruthers/Referees
'natural language is the medium for non-domain- specific thinking, serving to integrate the outputs of a variety of domain-specific conceptual faculties (or central-cognitive "quasi-modules")'
Li, P. & Gleitman, L. Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning, Cognition, 83 (2002), 265-296
Segall, M.H., Campbell, D.T. & Herskovits, M.J. The Influence of Culture on Visual Perception Bobbs-Merrill, 1966

 

         

                                           The Muller-Lyer illusion

'It was found that on both the Muller-Lyer and the Sander parallelogram illusions the European and American samples made significantly more illusion-supported responses than did the non-Western samples. On the two horizontal-vertical illusions, the European and American samples had relatively low scores ...' [p.210]
... For the Muller-Lyer and Sander parallelogram illusions we put forward the 'carpentered world" hypothesis and an "experience with two-dimensional representation of reality" hypothesis ... [for horizontal-vertical illusions] another aspect of the physical environment of peoples - specifically, the presence or absence of broad horizontal vistas -  is crucial ...' [p.212]

Two ways of counting floors (Oslo University)

Levinson, S.C. 1996 'Relativity in spatial conception and description' in J.J. Gumperz & S.C. Levinson (eds.) Rethinking linguistic relativity, CUP, 177-203