The Linguistic Relativity of Person Cognition: An English-Chinese Comparison

We performed an experiment to test the possibility that distinct languages (in this case, English and Chinese) are capable of exerting language-specific effects on people's impressions of and memory for other individuals. Parallel English- and Chinese-language descriptions were created of two characters exemplifying personality schemas with economical labels in English but not in Chinese, and two characters exemplifying personality schemas with economical labels in Chinese but not in English. Three groups of subjects participated in the experiment: English monolingual^ Chinese-English bilinguals who read and responded in English, and Chinese-English bilinguals who read and responded in Chinese. We predicted that subjects processing the target descriptions in English would show greater evidence of schematic thinking in the case of the two characters representing Englishlabeled schemas, whereas subjects processing the target descriptions in Chinese would show greater evidence of schematic thinking in the case of the two characters representing Chinese-labeled schemas. This prediction was confirmed. Both impressions and memory were affected when the target's personality and behavior conformed to a labeled schema in the subject's language of processing. The results are discussed in relation to current social psychological conceptions of schematic processing and in relation to the Whorfian hypothesis of linguistic relativity. The idea that the particular language one speaks importantly affects the manner in which one perceives and thinks about the world—the linguistic relativity hypothesis—has a long but somewhat checkered history within the disciplines of psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and philosophy. Benjamin Lee Whorf, this century's most influential proponent of the linguistic relativity hypothesis, expressed its central proposition as follows: