It has long been observed that the words of one language cannot always be mapped directly onto the words of another. For example, the English words fate and destiny have no equivalent in some languages, and Russian has separate words for a wife’s brother, wife’s sister’s husband, and husband’s brother, all called brother-in-law in English. For such cases concerning abstract and social domains, it can be argued that cultures develop different concepts which are reflected in their languages. Our research has shown, however, that for common, concrete household objects such as bottles, jars, and other containers, speakers of different languages may share perception of the similarities among the objects yet have distinctly different patterns of discriminating among them by name. This finding raises the dual questions of how languages come to diverge in their patterns of naming when speakers of the languages share conceptualization of the domain, and whether the diversity that exists is nevertheless in some way constrained by universals of thought.  Our current projects are aimed at investigating how the encoding of meaning in language is constrained by shared non-linguistic experience and in what ways meanings nevertheless come to diverge across languages.

Related publications:

Malt, B.C. (1995).  Category coherence in cross‑cultural perspective.  Cognitive Psychology, 29, 85-148.

Malt, B.C., Sloman, S.A., Gennari, S., Shi, M., and Wang, Y. (1999).  Knowing versus naming: Similarity and the linguistic categorization of artifacts.  Journal of Memory and Language, 40, 230-262.

Malt, B.C., Sloman, S.A., and Gennari, S. (2003). Universality and language specificity in object naming.  Journal of Memory and Language, 49, 20-42. 

Malt, B.C., Gennari, S., Imai, M., Ameel, E., Tsuda, N., and Majid, A. (2007).  Talking about walking:  Biomechanics and the language of locomotion.  Manuscript under review.