Language plays a pivotal role in shaping how we construct and refine concept representations. Through language, we not only label and categorize objects, but we also establish the relationships and hierarchies among them. Importantly, different languages have distinct vocabularies that may emphasize certain features of reality while downplaying others. For example, English highlights the feature of depth when it comes to categorizing dishes you can eat from, creating a distinction between the concepts plate and bowl based on depth alone. Mandarin, however, also highlights the feature of rim size, such that the distinction between pān and wǎn is based both on depth and rim size. Thus, a dish considered a bowl in English may not always be mapped to wǎn in Mandarin. Despite behavioral evidence of cross-linguistic categorization differences, developing a precise characterization of whether and how these distinct naming patterns shape the neural organization of conceptual representations has proven
elusive; mainly because the vast between-subjects differences at such granular level of representation render comparing the neural representations of concepts across subjects unmanageable. Bilingual individuals are unique in that they possess two languages that not only use different labels for the same concepts, but often encompass distinct conceptual representations. This offers a unique opportunity to develop a mechanistic account of how labels (language) shape concepts in humans, and how the coexistence of two languages shapes conceptual representations in the bilingual mind.
NYU DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY
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