Imai M
Faculty of Environmental Information, Keio University, Endo, Fujisawa 252-8520.
Shinrigaku Kenkyu. 2000 Dec;71(5):415-33. doi: 10.4992/jjpsy.71.415.
Traditionally, the issue of the relationship between language and thought has been framed as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in which crosslinguistic-crosscultural universality or diversity of thought has been the center of the debate. The long-lasting debate revolving around the hypothesis has not yielded a clear, satisfactory conclusion. This unsatisfactory result seems to be largely attributed to the fact that (a) the term "thought" has been so vaguely defined, and that (b) the interpretation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis itself has been quite diverse among researchers. In this paper, I argue that the question we should ask is not whether thought is universal or different across different language groups. Instead, we should ask more specific (and realistic) questions, taking it for granted that our thought is constrained by innate language-independent cognitive faculties but at the same time a large part of our thought is shaped by language. The questions we should ask are: in what cognitive domains (e.g., spatial cognition, ontological knowledge, categorization of natural objects etc.), at what specific level (e.g., perception, memory, knowledge representation, on-line information processing) and in what degree (a) our thought is influenced by the specific structure of the given language (or is immune to it) and (b) our thought is shaped by language learning (or constrained by language-independent innate cognitive structure). In order to reevaluate the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in this new perspective, I reviewed literature mainly focusing on three distinctive cognitive domains: ontological knowledge with respect to individuation, categorization of natural objects, and spatial cognition.
传统上，语言与思维的关系问题一直被构建为萨丕尔-沃尔夫假说，其中思维的跨语言-跨文化普遍性或多样性一直是争论的焦点。围绕该假说展开的长期争论尚未得出明确、令人满意的结论。这种不尽人意的结果似乎很大程度上归因于以下事实：（a）“思维”一词的定义非常模糊；（b）研究人员对萨丕尔-沃尔夫假说本身的解释相当多样。在本文中，我认为我们应该问的问题不是不同语言群体的思维是普遍的还是不同的。相反，我们应该问更具体（且现实）的问题，假定我们的思维受到与生俱来的、与语言无关的认知能力的限制，但同时我们思维的很大一部分是由语言塑造的。我们应该问的问题是：在哪些认知领域（如空间认知、本体知识、自然物体的分类等）、在什么具体层面（如感知、记忆、知识表征在线信息处理）以及在何种程度上，（a）我们的思维受到特定语言结构的影响（或不受其影响），以及（b）我们的思维是由语言学习塑造的（或受独立于语言的先天认知结构的限制）。为了从这个新视角重新评估萨丕尔-沃尔夫假说，我主要回顾了聚焦于三个独特认知领域的文献：关于个体化的本体知识、自然物体的分类以及空间认知。
