Diversity in Cognition

Barbara Mertins

Introduction

The title of the book in your hands is Diversity in Cognition, a topic that has gained prominence in scientific, educational, and general discourse in the European and North American contexts. With the concept of inclusion replacing integration, diversity in thinking has become crucial in various settings of human life. While people differ in terms of appearance, gender, moral values, and other characteristics, it is worth examining from a cognitive point of view whether individuals from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds approach the external world from diverse perspectives. These ideas go back to Wilhelm von Humboldt who formulated in his book from 1836 (Humboldt 2009) that “language is the forming organ of thought” (German: Sprache ist das bildende Organ des Gedanken). Later on, at the beginning of the 20th century, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf as well as Franz Boas developed further the idea of language/grammar affecting human cognition and perception, and corroborated it with the first empirical data (Boas 1966; Sapir 1921; Whorf 1956). Dan Isaac Slobin’s famous paper from 1996 (Slobin 1996) has shifted the focus of linguistic relativity research from a static description of language and thought to a dynamic view on language processes, and thus on thinking and speaking. Modern research on linguistic relativity has brought in experimental research methods such as eye-tracking or EEG (electroencephalogram) and added a language processing perspective. The effects of language on cognition and partially also on perception has been proven for a number of different cognitive domains, such as locomotion (von Stutterheim et al. 2012; Mertins 2018), space (Levinson et al. 2002), gender (Boroditsky et al. 2003) or color (Roberson et al. 2000, 2005) in native, non-native and bilingual/multilingual speakers of different ages. Linguistic relativity or thinking-for-speaking (Slobin 1996) or seeing-for-speaking (Mertins 2018) has developed into an established research field which is currently expanding to new cognitive domains (e.g., numerical cognition, Gordon 2004) and participant groups (e.g., infants and young children Loewenstein & Gentner 2005).

Diversity in cognition presents a central theme within psycholinguistics research, with individual differences in particular interpreted in the light of such diversity. These observations also hold true for different types of acquisition: whether in second or foreign language acquisition or in bilingual first language acquisition, the search for universals and universal features has largely been replaced by the focus on cross-linguistic, language-specific, group-specific and individual differences. Among other things, these entail differences in cognition, language use or relevant extra-linguistic variables (e.g., socio-economic status or whether someone is left- or right-handed).

Some of the research articles featured in this volume are written in English, while others are in German. The German articles include a long abstract in English, to enable non-German speakers to access the research findings. The decision to include both English and German papers in this book was driven by the idea of diversity in thinking and publishing. English has been the lingua franca of science for the past five decades, and the majority of research articles are published in English. However, only a small number of active academics in the relevant fields for this book are native English speakers. It is essential to note that non-nativeness in a language does not diminish the value or interest of research results and ideas. Therefore, this book is bilingual to ensure that valuable research findings and ideas from non-native English scholars are not overlooked, removing at least in part the hurdles for non-native English scholars.

The approach taken in the present book is interdisciplinary, including various theoretical frameworks and methodologies, as well as research fields. It utilizes a range of methods that span from experimental setups, including eye-tracking, to data elicitation and corpus analyzes. In terms of speaker groups investigated, the volume is also diverse, encompassing monolingual and bilingual children and (young) adults, as well as second language and native speakers.

This edited volume comprises eight articles that approach the topic of diversity in cognition from various perspectives. Leimbrink, Harwardt, Lowes and Mertins investigated the connection between language, music and cognition on the basis of a large corpus of folk songs in Czech, English, German, and French. The findings indicate that specific musical variables, such as the upbeat or the overall pitch range, are driven by language-specific differences related to the underlying prosodic systems of the investigated languages. The authors interpreted the results as an effect of linguistic relativity on music composition. The second study examining linguistic relativity is by Marklová and Mertins. Its focus was on the perception of goal-oriented locomotion in young monolingual and bilingual adults and the study employed eye-tracking. Although the authors stipulate differences between bilingual and monolingual speakers, no relevant differences were found. The third study by Hanna S. Andresen also examined goal-oriented motion in verbalizations of English, German, and Norwegian native speakers. Her study clearly shows support of language-specific perspectives on event construal and is thus in line with the linguistic relativity principle.

The book includes two meta-studies, both drawing from a large body of previous studies. The first study by Maryam Fatemi looks into the distribution of gender marking within the entire Indo-European language family. It shows that grammatical gender marking concerns only a small number of European languages and cannot be considered a common grammatical category in this language family. The other meta-study by Katrin Odermann critically reviews previous research on meta-linguistic awareness in monolingual and bilingual children. It concludes that this area has been seriously under-studied for bilingual children and that some of the conclusions from monolingual children have been wrongly transferred into the bilingual context. The paper by Christopher J. Hall employs a cognitive perspective on English as a Lingua Franca (ELF), as an expression of linguistic diversity. Within this approach, it is shown how the phenomenon of ELF obliges all speakers to reconfigure traditional ontologies of English in terms of the individual resources that diverse language users deploy in usage events. The study by Hendrik Trescher discusses critically the so-called “easy language” actively used in German-speaking countries, for example, for people with special linguistic or cognitive needs. The volume concludes with a novel article by Renate Delucchi Danhier that attempts to visualize the diversity of academics involved in diversity research by using authentic personal information from these academics.

Although the articles in this book are diverse and differ in many aspects, they share several commonalities. Firstly, all papers present empirical evidence that contradicts the notion of universal cognition or a universal view of the world. This suggests that speakers with different linguistic backgrounds and/or cultures view and approach external reality differently. Some contributions ground their findings within the linguistic relativity principle, other emphasize individual factors and cross-linguistic variation. Secondly, all papers assume implicitly or explicitly the immense role of linguistic input in language learning, as well as general learning. This aspect is particularly important and visible in studies on child or adult learners. Overall, input is relevant not only in terms of its quantity, but also in terms of its quality and complexity.

Finally, the immense relevance of diversity in cognition and in thinking has explicit consequences for other fields of research and other aspects of human life. Making the assumption that people come from very different points of departure diminishes the idea of shared common ground. In other words, one could say that successful communication of any kind is rather a matter of good luck than a rule. Taking the findings of the studies in this volume and the general findings on diversity in language and cognition seriously, several consequences must follow, for example in pedagogy, didactics, language learning or even human justice. Also, given that most of the research presented here is biased, due to the European origin of the authors, one must assume that other views and data on the presented topics must exist. To conclude, diversity in cognition definitely leads to the liberating thought that there is no ultimate truth.

Maryam Fatemi

Synchronic overview of grammatical gender marking in Indo-European languages v

Abstract: In line with the theories of linguistic relativity (Whorf 1956), thinking for speaking (Slobin 1996), and seeing for speaking (Mertins 2018), which all argue that the grammatical feature of the language we speak influences the way we see the world and conceptualize it, grammatical gender makes a relevant category to explore such effect on our thoughts. The morphosyntactic feature of gender is linguistically marked in high number of languages in diverse forms. These diverse forms of representing gender of animate and inanimate entities in languages are based on semantic, morphological, and phonological principles. Different from the languages which express gender according to the aforementioned principles, the instance of a language like Farsi, with no grammatical gender-marking system, has depicted that gender information of the nouns can also be optionally represented by lexical description in postnominal positions. Such diverse forms of representing gender in various languages have made this grammatical feature a valid and relevant category for studying diversity in cognition. Looking at the literature on the influence of grammatical gender on thought, the issues of the WEIRD bias as well as Eurocentric bias have been observed. The results of such biased studies on only European languages can explain neither the linguistic variation nor can be taken as the basis for showing the possible cognitive diversity triggered through such variations. The goal of this article is to explicitly address the issues of the WEIRD bias as well as the Eurocentric bias by initially critically reviewing 43 empirical studies on grammatical gender in linguistic relativity and secondly exploring the current state of 413 Indo-European languages concerning +/- grammatical gender features, including the many languages without any expression of grammatical gender. The results of the critical review on 43 studies proves additional evidence for Eurocentric and WEIRD bias in the linguistic relativity framework, since in these studies only 20 languages were considered, among which fifteen Indo-European languages mainly spoken in Europe. The findings of this study on the state of 413 Indo-European languages concerning +/- grammatical gender feature firstly convey that 72 % of the Indo-European languages are spoken outside Europe. Secondly, it was found that only 198 languages have linguistic proof for the absence or presence of gender-marking systems. Furthermore, the results have revealed that most of these languages, 96 in number, express gender in a twofold system of masculine and feminine. Finally, out of all Indo-European languages, 215 languages have not been linguistically studied regarding their expression of grammatical gender.