Possessing a language is one of the central features that distinguishes humans from other species. Many people share the intuition that they think “in” language, hence that the absence of language would, ipso facto, be the absence of thought. | To appear in K. Holyoak and B. Morrison (eds.), Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Language and thought* Lila Gleitman and Anna Papafragou University of Pennsylvania Keywords: categorical perception; Whorf; linguistic relativity; linguistic determinism; concepts; categorization; space; number Possessing a language is one of the central features that distinguishes humans from other species. Many people share the intuition that they think “in” language, hence that the absence of language would, ipso facto, be the absence of thought. One compelling version of this self-reflection is Helen Keller’s (1955) report that her recognition of the signed symbol for ‘water’ triggered thought processes which had theretofore -- and consequently -- been utterly absent. Statements to the same or related effect come from the most diverse intellectual sources: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world” (Wittgenstein, 1922]; and “The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group” (Sapir, 1941, as cited in Whorf, 1956, p. 75). * We thank Jerry Fodor for a discussion of the semantics of raining, Ray Jackendoff for a discussion of phonology, as well as Dan Slobin and Dedre Gentner for their comments on this chapter. Much of our perspective derives from our collaborative work with Cynthia Fisher, Henry Gleitman, Christine Massey, Kimberly Cassidy, Jeff Lidz, Peggy Li, and Barbara Landau. Writing of this paper was supported by NIH grant #1-R01- HD37507-02 to J. Trueswell and . Gleitman and NIH grant #1F32MH65020-01A2 to A. Papafragou. The same intuition arises with regard to particular languages and dialects. Speaking the language of one’s childhood seems to conjure up a host of social and cultural attitudes, beliefs, memories, and emotions, as though returning to the Casbah or
