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Max Planck Institute
About MPI

 

The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is an institute of the German Max Planck Society. Our mission is to undertake basic research into the psychological,social and biological foundations of language. The goal is to understand how our minds and brains process language, how language interacts with other aspects of mind, and how we can learn languages of quite different types.

The institute is situated on the campus of the Radboud University. We participate in the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, and have particularly close ties to that institute's Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging. We also participate in the Centre for Language Studies. A joint graduate school, the IMPRS in Language Sciences, links the Donders Institute, the CLS and the MPI.

 

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Do languages shape the way we think?

On August 26, 2010, the online magazine of the New York Times has published an extensive story on how languages shape the way people think. It's covering much of the space research done by the Language and Cognition group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics.

Do languages shape the way we think?

Photo by Horacio Salinas for The New York Times

August 27, 2010

The New York Times article provides an overview of various iterations of the idea that languages shape the way we think, focusing on the language of space as 'the area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light'. It chronicles how the discovery of absolute systems of reckoning space, as in the Australian language Guugu Yimithirr, inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space in Stephen Levinson's Language and Cognition group.

Focal points

'Using cross-linguistic variation as a source of insight into language 
and cognition has always been one of the focal points of work in the Language and Cognition group', says MPI director Stephen Levinson. The Space project pioneered the use of systematic cross-cultural data and led to high impact publications in major journals. The New York Times article concludes by highlighting the importance of research into language diversity. 'As a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.'

Link to the article

Last checked 2010-09-24 by Myrna Tinbergen

Max Planck Institute
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