The Role of Language and Culture in Universality and Diversity of Human Concepts

Th e infl uence of language and culture has been investigated across diff erent research disciplines such as anthropology, cognitive psychology, and cultural psychology, but such research all tends to ask whether language (or culture) infl uences cognition in general, without clearly specifying what is meant by “language” or “culture.” Th is chapter proposes an alternative approach, whose aim is to specify a complex interplay among various factors—including universal cognitive constraints, perceptual aff ordances provided from the world, task-specifi c constraints, language-specifi c biases, and culture-specifi c cognitive styles—to account for people’s behavior in a given cognitive task and the developmental trajectory of that behavior. To establish this point, four research programs examining the roles of language and culture in terms of construal and organization of objects, relations among objects, and actions are reviewed.