The influence of language on thought 

Besides asking how thought is encoded in language, one can ask about the interface from the other direction:  Does the language a person learns influence the way she thinks?  The influential Whorfian hypothesis proposes that the answer to this question is yes. For instance, languages differ in what information about motion is typically encoded in the main verbs of sentences (information about the path/direction of the motion -- as in enter, exit -- versus about the manner of the motion -- as in run, hop, etc.). These differences have led some researchers to suggest that speakers of different languages will attend to different elements of events involving motion. If linguistic and non-linguistic knowledge are as separate as we have hypothesized, however, this need not be true. We have found that under most, but not all, conditions Spanish speakers (whose language tends to encode path), and English speakers (whose language tends to encode manner), perceive and remember motion events similarly, and we have considered possible mechanisms by which some influence of language on thought may be seen.

Related publications:

Gennari, S., Sloman, S.A., Malt, B. C., and Fitch, W.T. (2002).  Motion events in language and cognition.  Cognition, 83, 49-79.

Malt, B.C., Sloman, S.A., and Gennari, S.  (2003).   Speaking vs. thinking about objects and actions.  In D. Gentner &  S. Goldin-Meadow (Eds.)  Language in mind:  Advances in the study of language and thought (pp. 81-111).  Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press. 

Malt, B. C. (2006).  Opening the black box on language, culture, and thought.  In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference of the Cognitive Sciences (p. 60 -61). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.