Returning the tables:
language affects spatial reasoning
Stephen C. Levinsona,*, Sotaro Kitaa
,
Daniel B.M. Hauna
, Bjo¨rn H. Raschb
a
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
b
Department of Psychology, University of Trier, Trier, Germany
Received 27 September 2001; received in revised form 2 February 2002; accepted 8 March 2002
Abstract
Li and Gleitman (Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning. Cognition, in press) seek to
undermine a large-scale cross-cultural comparison of spatial language and cognition which claims to
have demonstrated that language and conceptual coding in the spatial domain covary (see, for
example, Space in language and cognition: explorations in linguistic diversity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, in press; Language 74 (1998) 557): the most plausible interpretation
is that different languages induce distinct conceptual codings. Arguing against this, Li and Gleitman
attempt to show that in an American student population they can obtain any of the relevant conceptual
codings just by varying spatial cues, holding language constant. They then argue that our
findings are better interpreted in terms of ecologically-induced distinct cognitive styles reflected
in language. Linguistic coding, they argue, has no causal effects on non-linguistic thinking – it
simply reflects antecedently existing conceptual distinctions. We here show that Li and Gleitman
did not make a crucial distinction between frames of spatial reference relevant to our line of research.
We report a series of experiments designed to show that they have, as a consequence, misinterpreted
the results of their own experiments, which are in fact in line with our hypothesis. Their attempts to
reinterpret the large cross-cultural study, and to enlist support from animal and infant studies, fail for
the same reasons. We further try to discern exactly what theory drives their presumption that
language can have no cognitive efficacy, and conclude that their position is undermined by a
wide range of considerations. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Language; Spatial reasoning; Linguistic relativity
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 155
Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188
www.elsevier.com/locate/cognit
0010-0277/02/$ - see front matter q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
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C O G N I T I O N
* Corresponding author. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, P.O. Box 310, NL-6500 AH Nijmegen,
The Netherlands.
E-mail address: stephen.levinson@mpi.nl (S.C. Levinson).
1. Language and thought in the spatial domain
There seem to be two main currents of speculation about the relationship between
linguistic systems and other conceptual systems. One line assumes that language is merely
an input/output system for an innately grounded ‘language of thought’, so that a language
either directly reflects an antecedently available pool of universal concepts (Fodor, 1975)
or it builds on a rich, core set of ‘natural’ concepts constituting a universal conceptual base
(Landau & Jackendoff, 1993; Pinker, 1994).1
The other, noting that language is a human
prerogative, suggests that the possession of language in general, and specific languages in
particular, may reorganize and restructure the underlying cognition even in domains such
as space that have been considered ‘natural’ and ‘universal’. The role of language in
restructuring thought may then account for some of the special properties of human
thinking (Dennett, 1991; Lucy, 1992a; Spelke & Tsivkin, 2001).
There has been a recent resurgence of interest in this second possibility (see, for
example, Bowerman & Levinson, 2001; Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, in press). Our
own work has been dedicated to exploring this possibility empirically in the spatial
domain. Spatial thinking is essential to any animal, and it is a domain where one might
expect the strongest biological basis and most conceptual uniformity. But it turns out that
there is in fact a great deal of cross-cultural variation in the semantic relations and
categories of spatial language. Moreover, in correlation with those language-specific
relations and categories, the same or similar distinctions can be shown to play a role in
non-linguistic memory and reasoning tasks (Levinson, 1996b; Pederson et al., 1998). We
interpret this as evidence in favor of the second position.
In a paper in this issue, Li and Gleitman (in press) try to defend an extreme version of
the first position, arguing that thinking is independent of, and impervious to, the details of
linguistic coding. “Linguistic systems are merely the formal and expressive medium that
speakers devise to describe their mental representations” (p. 290, their emphasis), for
“linguistic categories and structures are more-or-less straightforward mappings from a
preexisting conceptual space, programmed into our biological nature”, with the consequence
that “all languages are broadly similar”(p. 266). To maintain this thesis, they target
our cross-cultural comparison of spatial language and cognition which appears to demonstrate
that language and conceptual coding in the spatial domain covary, with the apparent
implication that different languages induce distinct conceptual codings (see, for example,
Levinson, in press; Pederson et al., 1998). Li and Gleitman’s strategy is to try and show
that in an American student population they can obtain any of the relevant conceptual
codings just by varying spatial cues, holding language constant. They then argue that our
findings are better interpreted in terms of ecologically-induced distinct cognitive styles
reflected in language. Linguistic coding, they argue, has no cognitive efficacy or cognitive
effects – it simply reflects antecedently existing conceptual distinctions.
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188156
1
Thus, Pinker (1994, p. 82) presumes “a universal mentalese”, with the corollary “Knowing a language, then is
knowing how to translate mentalese into strings of words and vice-versa. People without a language would still
have mentalese, and babies and many nonhuman animals presumably have simpler dialects”. Landau and Jackendoff
(1993, p. 235) argue that the universal properties of spatial conception should directly reflect in language
so that we “should find broad similarities in the expression of object and place across languages”, especially in
closed-class systems of morphemes.
In this response, we concentrate on the specific issues raised by Li and Gleitman’s
critique of our empirical work. We show that Li and Gleitman did not make the essential
conceptual distinctions in this domain – specifically between the different kinds of spatial
frames of reference. We try to show that, as a consequence, they have misinterpreted their
own experiments. To do this, we replicate their experiments with crucial variants to
demonstrate that their results, taken together with our new results, are in fact consistent
with the hypothesis of a language-driven preference for conceptual coding. Their attempt
to enlist animal and infant studies fails for the same reasons, namely through not making
the right distinctions in the studies of frames of reference. The same analytical problems
undermine their attempt to reinterpret our large cross-cultural survey. We conclude that
our findings stand: there is a demonstrable correlation between the frames of reference
used in language and those used in non-linguistic conceptual coding, and the most plausible
interpretation is that speaking a specific language can induce specific patterns of nonlinguistic
conceptualization.
Our response must focus on the fundamental conceptual issues involved in the study of
spatial frames of reference, but readers should know that the essential phenomenon that
provoked our investigations is the following. In a nutshell: there are human populations
scattered around the world who speak languages which have no conventional way to
encode ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘front’, and ‘back’ notions, as in ‘turn left’, ‘behind the tree’, and
‘to the right of the rock’.2
Instead, these peoples express all directions in terms of cardinal
directions, a bit like our ‘East’, ‘West’, etc. Careful investigation of their non-linguistic
coding for recall, recognition, and inference, together with investigations of their deadreckoning
abilities and their on-line gesture during talk, shows that these people think the
way they speak, that is, they code for memory, inference, way-finding, gesture and so on in
‘absolute’ fixed coordinates, not ‘relative’ or egocentric ones (the full details can be found
in Levinson (in press), but the studies are now being replicated across the world by other
scholars; see, for example, Wassmann and Dasen (1998)). The phenomenon should be of
fundamental interest to cognitive science as showing human variability where least
expected, and should not be lost sight of in disagreements about its correct interpretation.
We proceed in the following way. First, we outline the distinctions essential to the study
of spatial frames of reference, and the reasoning behind our work. We also summarize our
results that Li and Gleitman attempt to undermine in their paper (Section 2). We then
critically review Li and Gleitman’s experiments and the thinking behind them (Section 3).
We then empirically show (Section 4), through variants of those experiments, that Li and
Gleitman have not correctly interpreted their own results, in large part because they did not
make the essential distinctions in frames of reference. Their results seem in fact largely in
line with our hypotheses. Then, we further discuss the crucial distinction in frames of
reference that Li and Gleitman did not make, and the implications of not making that
distinction (Section 5). Finally (in Section 6), we query Li and Gleitman’s theoretical
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 157
2
This is not a matter of preferential coding, as Li and Gleitman from time to time imply. These languages
simply lack, for example, any straightforward way of coding a ternary relation ‘x is to the left of y from vantage
point v’ as in “The ball is left of the tree”. Most of them also provide no coding for the simpler notion ‘at my left’,
or even ‘my left side’.
motivation – it is hard to find a plausible theory under which the language one speaks
would have no impact on the way one thinks.
2. Cross-cultural studies of frames of reference in language and cognition
The idea of distinct ‘frames of spatial reference’ is understood to imply the use of
underlying coordinate systems built on different principles (not to be confused with
different origins for the same coordinate system).3
Although the details vary widely,
our linguistic investigations show that there are three main over-arching types or families
of such system used in languages, which we have called relative, intrinsic and absolute, the
logical and spatial properties of which can be precisely delineated (as sketched below, but
see Levinson, 1996b, in press). In the relative frame of reference, objects are located in
terms of viewer-centered coordinates based on body axes (left/right/front/back), as in ‘The
ball is to the left of the chair’. In the intrinsic frame of reference, the location is described
in terms of the object-centered coordinates of the reference or landmark object based on
‘intrinsic’ facets of the object, as in ‘The ball is at the chair’s front’. In the absolute frame
of reference, things are described in terms of coordinates based on fixed bearings or
cardinal directions, centered on the reference object, as in ‘The ball is north of the
chair’. Why these three? Probably they all have bases in internal, innate systems guiding
most mammalian behavior (see Burgess, Jeffery, & O’Keefe, 1999, for possible brain
bases). These perceptual and motoric representations are at least partially encapsulated,
but nevertheless they may provide a repertoire for the development of conceptual systems,
a point taken up at the end of this paper.
In an extended systematic comparison involving two score scholars and over 20
languages from over a dozen stocks, we have shown that languages vary greatly in the
frames of reference they employ to describe spatial locations (see review in Levinson,
1996a; case study in Levinson, 1996b, in press, for the full details, as well as Pederson et
al., 1998, the focus of the Li and Gleitman paper). What is cross-linguistically variable,
from a semantic point of view, is (a) the particular conceptual details of each system (for
example, the geometry of axes), and (b) the fact that specific languages select from these
three frames of reference, using only one, or two or all three of them, variably (see, for
example, Levinson, in press; Pederson et al., 1998; Wilkins & Levinson, in press). It was
this variation in public, external linguistic representations that prompted our investigations
of variation in internal representations, such as those involved in coding experience for
memory.
Now, to investigate non-linguistic representations we used many techniques and many
kinds of observation regarding people’s sense of directionality. For example, we investiS.C.
Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188158
3
Rock (1992, p. 404) summarizes the Gestalt definition of a ‘frame of reference’ as follows: “a unit or
organization of units that collectively serve to define a coordinate system with respect to which certain properties
of objects, including the phenomenal self, are gauged”. The need to distinguish origin from coordinate system
becomes especially clear in language, where the same coordinate system (for example, relative) can be used with
distinct origins (for example, egocentric vs. allocentric) – see Levinson (1996b) where the many different
proposals about distinctions in types of frames of reference are compared, and the synthesis that is being used
here is justified in detail.
gated how gestural depiction of events is spatially oriented in a number of cultures (Haviland,
1993; Kita, Danziger, & Stolz, 2001; Levinson, in press; Wilkins, in press). We have
probed directionality in the memory for real-life events that people have experienced
(Levinson, 1997a). We have also examined dead-reckoning and navigational abilities in
various cultures (Levinson, 1996c, in press).4
In order to further probe non-linguistic conceptual representations in a more controlled
fashion, we also exploited the distinct logical and spatial properties that frames of reference
have under rotation, and we developed a battery of experiments under which a
participant is shown a stimulus on one table, then rotated 180 degrees and, for example,
asked to recognize the earlier stimulus from alternates, or remake the first stimulus, on
another table (first developed and reported in Levinson, 1992). The battery of tests systematically
explored recall, recognition memory, and different kinds of inference (Levinson,
1996b). What such an experiment distinguishes is whether participants are or are not
rotating the coordinates with themselves. It thus distinguishes between egocentric and
allocentric reference frames, but it does not precisely distinguish what kind of allocentric
reference frame is involved. Allocentric frames of reference include both absolute and
intrinsic ones, as explained with care in Levinson (1996b, pp. 148–152). To further
distinguish between these two, other tasks or collateral evidence is required. Higher
level classifications of the frames of reference are explained in Table 1 (but see riders
in Levinson, 1996b).
To see that rotation of the viewer makes no difference to intrinsic and absolute descriptions
as opposed to relative descriptions consider the descriptions below:
(1) Intrinsic: The ball is at the chair’s front.
(2) Absolute: The ball is north of the chair.
(3) Relative: The ball is to the left of the chair (from my viewpoint).
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 159
4
A reviewer asks how dead-reckoning could vary with frame of reference, since dead-reckoning is by definition
egocentric. The answer is that frames of reference (coordinate systems) are not equivalent to origins,
egocentric or otherwise. You could dead-reckon your current position in terms of distances covered on legs of
the journey after left and right turns (using an intrinsic or relative frame of reference depending on how the
journey is conceived), or you could reckon your position in terms of celestial observations (using an absolute
frame of reference).
Table 1
Classifications of frames of reference
Orientation-free Orientation-bound
Allocentric Egocentric
Intrinsic Absolute Relative
Description falsified under rotation of viewer No No Yes
Description falsified under rotation of Ground (i.e.
reference object)
Yes No No
Assume that each of them is true for the array from a fixed vantage point. Now walk
around to the other side of the array: (1) and (2) will stay true, but (3) will now be false.
To dissociate (1) and (2) you need to carry out another rotation: let us now rotate the
Ground (or landmark or reference) object, the chair – now (1) is falsified, (2) remains true
and (3) remains false. All this is explained at length in Levinson (1996b).
The first rotation, of the viewer, distinguishes egocentric from allocentric coordinate
systems; the second rotation, of the Ground object, distinguishes orientation-free vs.
orientation-bound allocentric systems.5
We have thus generally relied on multiple results
to disambiguate both the linguistic and non-linguistic picture, for these rotations can be
simply applied to investigate the spatial and logical properties of non-linguistic coding for
memory and inference. We underscore these points because the Li and Gleitman experiments,
described in Section 3 below, confound intrinsic and absolute frames of reference.
Our work has been based on first investigating the frames of reference utilized in the
local language, then making a prediction about what frames of reference will not occur in
non-linguistic coding – for example, we would predict that if a population uses a language
where only intrinsic and absolute frames are coded, then members of that population will
not generally use the relative frame for non-linguistic coding for memory and inference.
For this, it will suffice to test the one rotation, that of the viewer. But from the absence of
non-linguistic relative coding we cannot make the reverse linguistic prediction: the
language may have effectively only absolute, only intrinsic, or both those frames of
reference. Our predictions follow the logic of our hypothesis, that language predicts
cognitive coding strategies. In contrast, Li and Gleitman want to explore primarily the
non-linguistic coding of arrays in context, and for this they must disambiguate between the
two allocentric frames of reference, which they failed to do and which we attempt to do for
them below with a new experiment.
Only once we have a precise understanding of linguistic coding in the relevant dialect
for the precise subject population do we turn to the non-linguistic experimentation.
Obviously here great care has to be taken to control the verbal instructions in each native
language and make sure that no verbal or non-verbal clue is present to bias the results.
Delays, and verbal tasks interposed between stimulus and response, can be utilized to
suppress subvocal rehearsal. Because many of these experiments were run in field conditions
on uneducated peoples without written languages, they had to be relatively simple.
Nevertheless the full battery of tasks involves tests for recognition, recall, inference from
motion to path, and transitive inference.
The results from all of these different methods – the study of gesture, way-finding and
rotation experiments on memory and inference – converge. It turns out that there are strong
correlations between the frames of reference involved in linguistic tasks and those
involved in non-linguistic tasks. Our investigation of gesture in various cultures reveals
that where languages use predominantly an absolute or cardinal direction system, and do
not use relative left/right/front/back axes, gestures preserve correct cardinal directions. For
example, in an Australian aboriginal community, two natural tellings of the same story
filmed at a 2 year interval preserved every orientation, for example, of a boat rolling over
westwards (Haviland, 1993). This suggests that every event is coded in memory for correct
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188160
5
There is a technical literature on these distinctions – see the discussion in Levinson (1996b, pp. 127–134).
fixed orientation. A further investigation of memory of directionality in real-life events
confirms this (Levinson, 1997a). We have also examined dead-reckoning and navigational
abilities in various cultures, and found that these vary with the predominant frame of
reference in the language (Levinson, 1996c, in press).
The experiments involving 180 degree rotation of participants, as explained above, also
show a striking correlation between the frames of reference predominant in the languages
of the participants and those employed in non-verbal memory and inference tasks. Levinson
(1997a) investigated speakers of Guugu Yimithirr, a language that expresses directionality
based on the absolute frame of reference (this language does not have linguistic
means to express directionality based on the relative frame of reference). It was found that
they also used the absolute frame of reference in a number of different non-linguistic
experiments based on the rotation logic. Pederson (1995) compared two dialects of Tamil
speakers, one of which uses expressions based on absolute (and intrinsic) frame of reference
(‘absolute speakers’), and the other of which uses expressions based on relative (and
intrinsic) frame of reference (‘relative speakers’). Different rotation experiments revealed
that the absolute speakers are more likely to give non-linguistic responses based on the
absolute frame of reference than the relative speakers (see also Pederson et al., 1998).
Pederson et al. (1998) compared two languages that use expressions based on the relative
frame of reference, Japanese and Dutch, and three languages that use expressions based on
the absolute frame of reference, Longgu, Tzeltal and Arrernte. In this study, a rotation
experiment that involved recall of a row of three animals was administered. It was found
that Japanese and Dutch speakers coded the row of animals based on the relative frame of
reference and Longgu, Tzeltal and Arrernte speakers coded the spatial array based on the
absolute frame of reference. Li and Gleitman’s critique is based on this study, and they use
different variations of this experiment, which we shall call Animals-in-a-row. Levinson (in
press), which was not available to Li and Gleitman through the timing of publication,
summarizes further evidence based on rotation experiments in a larger sample and other
studies probing non-linguistic representation of directionality in different cultures.
Thus, the evidence has amassed from numerous cross-cultural studies for systematic
covariation between the frames of reference used in language and the frames used in
non-linguistic aspects of cognition. In order to rule out other factors that may contribute
to the choice of the frames of reference preferred in non-linguistic tasks, we have
checked for statistical correlations with literacy, age, sex, or indices of culture-change,
and found few such correlations (Levinson, in press; Levinson & Nagy, 1998). For
example, there is no general correlation between literacy or years of schooling in our
sample – only in the Tamil and Belhare subsamples (peoples in touch with populations
who use relative systems) is there any positive correlation of literacy with coding-strat-
egy.
So, if there is a correlation between linguistic frame of reference and non-linguistic
frame of reference, which is chicken and which is egg? We reasoned as follows (Levinson,
1996b, 1997b; Pederson et al., 1998):
1. There are neighboring, closely related cultures in similar ecology in which distinct
subsets of the linguistic frames of reference are used (for example, three Mayan cultures
we have investigated: Mopan, intrinsic only; Tzeltal, absolute and intrinsic; Yukatek,
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 161
relative, absolute and intrinsic), so material culture and ecology can not be the only
determinant.
2. If you are going to speak a language which, for example, only uses the absolute frame of
reference, you will have to code scenes in memory using absolute coordinates. This
follows from the fact that the frames of reference are not intertranslatable without
ancillary information (Levinson, 1996b). So specific linguistic frames of reference
demand specific non-linguistic coding.6
3. To get a community-wide consensus, there must be a community-shared source – which
suggests language or some other semiotic system (like gesture) as a crucial catalyst.
Hence, we concluded, cautiously, that language is probably the driving force.
In sum, the program, of which the rotation experiments form a part, has been based on
the following ingredients:
(1) careful collection of linguistic data according to standardized protocols and communication
tasks taken from the community to be tested;
(2) the formulation of hypotheses about non-verbal cognition on the basis of the verbal
behavior in (1);
(3) the observation and recording of verbal and non-verbal spatial behavior, including
language acquisition (see Brown & Levinson, 2000), gesture and daily way-finding
(Levinson, 1996c, in press);
(4) the testing of the hypotheses using the rotation paradigm, the results being interpreted
in the light of (1) and (3).
3. The Li and Gleitman experiments
Li and Gleitman suspect that our experimental results are artifacts of the environmental
conditions under which they were carried out, and reflect nothing about underlying
cognitive differences, let alone linguistic determinism. They imply that our
experiments with absolute populations were mostly run outside, and all with relative
populations inside. But in fact there is no such confound – some of our strongest absolute
results come from populations, such as Aboriginal Australians, tested indoors. For example,
the Arrernte data reported in Pederson et al. (1998) were in fact collected in a room
without any window (and similarly the Guugu Yimithirr data reported in Levinson
(1997a) were collected indoors), while the Tzeltal data Li and Gleitman gloss as
‘outdoors’ were in fact collected under a low veranda, with restricted visual access
not dissimilar to indoors with windows, and similar experiments were carried out indoors
with similar results. And we had strong relative results from small ethnic groups tested
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188162
6
A reviewer asks whether it might not be possible to use egocentric imagery to calculate absolute coordinates
in real-time when required. Try thinking of your childhood bedroom and now describe without hesitation the
location of the door, window, cupboard, etc. in correct cardinal direction terms – this is computationally demanding,
if you can do it at all. If you can do it, you have at least one ‘fix’ to an absolute coordinate – without this you
cannot ever recover the correct directions. In actual fact, there is evidence that absolute speakers/thinkers code
mental imagery right at the start in cardinal direction terms (Levinson, 1996b, pp. 123–124, 1997a).
outdoors.7
Not, at least originally, aware of this, Li and Gleitman therefore tested American
speakers of English under varying ecological conditions.
Of all of our experiments, Li and Gleitman have chosen to replicate the very simplest
(‘Animals-in-a-row’ – see Levinson (in press) for the many converging results from other
experiments) and have gone on to simplify it further. The task in essence consists of
presenting participants with a row of three animals on a table, rotating the participants
180 degrees, and making them reconstruct the array on another table so that to their
satisfaction it matches the first. In our experiment, it was a crucial part of the design
that participants’ attention was deflected from the direction of the stimulus by being
required to memorize the order and identity of three toy animals drawn from a larger
set of four (Levinson, 1996b, p. 114). It was presented as a memory test, first without
rotation, then with rotation (and both accuracy of order and direction were coded), and the
participant was walked up to 20 m between stimulus and response.
The details of the Li and Gleitman replication vary from the original, including no
translation of the participant and no delay after removal of the stimulus and thus a
considerably shorter period for retention in memory,8
and most importantly, the participant’s
memory task was reduced by presenting the subject with the three animals used in
the stimulus, not the full set of four.9
As we shall show, memory load can make a major
difference (see our Experiment 2 below), and in addition when the experiment becomes
too transparent participants may second-guess the experimenter’s interest in direction
rather than order or type of animal. It seems clear from the Li and Gleitman report that
many of their participants were second-guessing the experimenter’s intentions – they
queried the instructions in a way that suggests that direction was clearly at issue. It is
always hard to design a task that is matched across schooled and unschooled subject
populations, but this should have been a warning that the task was not sufficiently opaque,
for what we are interested in is participants’ non-reflective utilization of a spatial coding
scheme for memory, not what they think the experimenters think they should be doing.
Incidentally, for this reason in our original Dutch experiments we used 40 participants of
mixed ages (21–77), sex and occupational background, like the participants in our crosscultural
studies.
Li and Gleitman then go on to see if they can vary the results of the same experiment by
varying the environmental conditions – in that case the results would show nothing about
language or conceptual predispositions, but only about context. So they ran the task
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 163
7
For example, Bantu Kgalagadi speakers – who speak a language with both Relative and Absolute terms
available – used systematic Relative non-verbal coding on some of our memory tasks.
8
They used a swivel chair to rotate the participant. This just could have the effect that the participant thinks of
the whole setup as one location, not as in our experiment two locations separated by arbitrary distance. The
predicted effect of that would be to make an intrinsic frame of reference more salient, and that, as we shall show,
can partially mimic an absolute one.
9
In this, they followed a deviation from the standard elicitation method for the study reported in Pederson et al.
(1998), which was used on the first population to be tested (Tzeltal), as reported in Brown and Levinson (1993, p.
14). We took this simplification in this initial testing (before the standardization of the method), fearing that this
unschooled Mayan population would not manage the memory task. It subsequently became clear on all other
tasks that we need not have worried. All other populations reported in Pederson et al. (1998) were run with the
standardized procedure of offering four animals to the participant for reconstruction.
indoors with blinds up or blinds down, inside vs. outside (Experiment 2a), and indoors
with or without additional local environmental cues (Experiment 2b). What they found
was that such environmental manipulations seemed to vary the results: the more
‘outdoorsy’ the setting (windows open, or out in the park), the more ‘absolute’ the results,
and in inside conditions, strong table-top cues could be seen to bias the results in either
direction, absolute or relative. More precisely, in the inside but blinds up condition in
Experiment 2a, they reported mixed relative/absolute responses (although there was no
statistically reliable difference between the blinds up/blinds down conditions), and in the
outside condition they reported similar mixed absolute/relative responses, now significantly
different than the indoor/blinds down condition. In the internal cue situation
(Experiment 2b), they appeared to obtain relative responses when the cues were placed
at say the left of each table, but absolute responses when they were placed at say the north
end of each table.
On the assumption that their American participant population uses predominantly relative
and intrinsic linguistic coding for all conditions (not just the one tested), then the
results in Experiment 2b are in fact not unexpected on the assumption of a correlation
between frames of reference available in language and those predominant in cognition, in
ways that we will explain. But the results in Experiment 2a in the outdoor condition are
more puzzling from our point of view.
4. Some more experiments: probing the Li and Gleitman results
We set out to try and find out why Li and Gleitman got the responses they got, and we
conducted three sets of experiments. A first step was to try and replicate their results. Since
our Dutch data as reported in Pederson et al. (1998) had been obtained under a ‘blinds up’
condition over six different rotation experiments (see Levinson, 1996b, in press, for the
description of the other tasks), all without any shred of evidence of absolute coding
tendency, we saw no chance of being able to replicate the Li and Gleitman finding
under that condition.
But clearly we needed to see if we could replicate the outside condition. Like Li and
Gleitman, we chose a location in the center of campus, and one where there are strong
environmental cues to direction. We administered three different tasks for each participant.
The first one is the Animals-in-a-row task, in which we sought to replicate the Dutch
result reported in Pederson et al. (1998) in an outdoor setting. We used the method as
described in Pederson et al. (1998). And, the participants had to chose three animals out of
the four offered to reconstruct an array, unlike Li and Gleitman’s experiment in which the
same three animals were given to the participants for reconstruction.
The second task was the ‘Motion-maze’ task (Pederson & Schmitt, 1993). In this task,
the memory for directionality is embedded in a larger task; thus it reduces the chance of
participants second-guessing the purpose of the experiment, and increases the chance of
participants falling back on their habitual default frame of reference. The maze task
requires the participant to observe the movement of a toy man, then under rotation to
recognize the path traversed from within a maze-like diagram containing both absolute
and relative possibilities (see Fig. 1). It has been shown that speakers of absolute languages
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188164
(Tzeltal and Arrernte) recognize the path based on the absolute frame of reference, and
speakers of relative languages (Dutch and Japanese) recognize the path based on the
relative frame of reference (Levinson, 1996b, in press).
The results from the above two ‘outdoor’ tasks will be compared to the Dutch results for
the same tasks run under the ‘indoor blinds-up’ condition in earlier studies (Levinson, in
press; Pederson et al., 1998). In those earlier studies, the methods were the same as those in
the current experiments, except that in the original studies we used participants of mixed
ages (21–77), sex, and occupational background, while the current experiments use a
student population like Li and Gleitman’s.
The last task to be administered was a linguistic task, requiring the verbal distinction
between two lateral mirror-image photos. This was to probe the linguistic frame of reference
in the outdoor condition (note that the linguistic data Li and Gleitman report were
collected not outdoors, but indoors in a room with a view to the outside through a
window).
4.1. Experiment 1: three tasks in an ‘outdoor’ condition
4.1.1. Method
4.1.1.1. Site The experiment was administered in a large open space outside the university
canteen, an area familiar to all students. The north–south/east–west grid layout of the
campus is particularly evident at this location. Buildings surrounding the location provide
overwhelming directional cues. To the east is a large tower block (the tallest not only in the
university, but also in the city). To the west is the only cafe´ in the university. To the south
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 165
Fig. 1. Motion-maze task.
is the building for the main university canteen. To the north is the main library of the
university.
4.1.1.2. Layout Two tables were placed 4 m apart so that one table was north of the other.
Participants stood between the two tables and were rotated 180 degrees in walking from
one to the other. The stimulus arrays were place along an east–west axis. The participants
started at the stimulus presentation table and then turned and walked to the recall table.
4.1.1.3. Participants Twenty local university students were recruited at the experiment
site. They received 8.5 guilders for participating in the experiment. All the participants
were tested individually. Each participant did the following three tasks.
4.1.1.4. Animals-in-a-row task The first task to be administered was Animals-in-a-row.
This task was developed by Levinson and Schmitt (1993).
4.1.1.4.1. Material Stimulus arrays were created from a set of four plastic animals (pig,
horse, cow, and sheep) from the Duploe series for infants. Their shapes are symmetrical
along their head-to-tail axis. The four animals have distinct colors and shapes. The sizes
range from 5 to 7 cm from the head to the tail, and they are all 2.5 cm wide and 3–4 cm tall.
4.1.1.4.2. Procedure All participants were tested individually. A session consisted of a
few training and practice trials followed by five experimental trials. For all trials, the
experimenter set up a row of three animals from the four available on the presentation
table. The animals were facing either the participant’s left or right, along an east–west
axis. The animals were separated from each other by roughly 6 cm.
The participant was told to remember the animals just as they were. The participant was
allowed to look at the stimulus array as long as he or she liked. The participant was asked
whether he or she was ready, and if he or she said yes, the array was removed. For the
initial practice trial(s), the participant was immediately given the four animals, and was
asked to rebuild the row of animals in the same way on the stimulus presentation table
without any rotation of the participant’s body. Note that he or she had to choose the three
appropriate animals out of the four given to rebuild the array. The direction, the order, and
the identity of the animals were corrected if necessary. The procedure was repeated until
the participant’s performance became consistent.
In the experimental trials, the participant was told that he or she would do the same
thing, but that this time they should reconstruct a row of animals elsewhere. Again, three
out of the four animals were placed in a row on the presentation table, and the participant
was asked to remember them just as they were. After the participant indicated readiness,
the animals were removed. The participant was required to wait for 30 s,10
and then walk to
the recall table. Here, the experimenter offered the four animals to the participants, and
asked him/her to rebuild the row. No correction was made to the participant’s response.
All presentations were along the left–right axis. The order and direction of the stimulus
array were semi-randomized.
Throughout the experiment, none of the instructions contained any words denoting
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188166
10
This delay reduces the chance of direct recall from short-term memory (visual scratch pad or auditory loop).
Participants were allowed to look at whatever they wanted. The participant and the experimenter did not converse
during this period. There was additional delay and visual input resulting from walking between two tables.
spatial directions or locations. If a reference to a location or direction became necessary
during the training, deictic terms (‘here’, ‘this’) and pointing gestures were used.
4.1.1.4.3. Coding Responses were coded for either absolute (actually allocentric) or
relative (here, egocentric) direction in which the animals were facing when rebuilt. As
well as direction, the sequence of animals was also recorded in order to screen out trials
that were especially poorly remembered. When the location of all the animals was wrong,
namely, when the array cow–sheep–horse was rebuilt as sheep–cow–horse, the trial was
not considered.
4.1.1.5. Motion-maze This was the second task to be administered. This task was
developed by Pederson and Schmitt (1993).
4.1.1.5.1. Procedure All participants were tested individually. A session consisted of a
few practice trials followed by five experimental trials. For all trials, the experimenter
demonstrated a motion along a path by a plastic toy man (about 5 cm tall) moved manually
but precisely on the presentation table. A small cross (about 1 cm by 1 cm) printed on a
circular piece of paper (about 5 cm in diameter) was placed on the presentation table, and it
served as a starting point of the toy man.
Before the demonstration of motion, the experimenter said, “Now this little man is
going to go for a walk from this cross. Watch carefully because I want you to remember
how he goes”. Then, the experimenter walked the toy man from the starting-point cross.
The motion was scaled to a particular path on the maze, which the participant did not see
during the presentation of the paths. The paths consisted of straight segments that were
either along a right–left axis (which was also an east–west axis) or a front–back axis. The
paths for practice trials had one or two segments (the paths for experimental trials had two
or three segments, as in Fig. 2). The experimenter produced ‘footstep’ sound effects as the
man was moved to emphasize the distance between turns. The motion was repeated twice
(or until the participant indicated readiness). Then, the man and the paper with a cross
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 167
Fig. 2. The paths to be remembered in the Motion-maze task.
were removed, and a maze printed on 27 cm by 27 cm paper was put on the table. The
participant was asked where the man would end up on the maze if he had followed the
precise path previously demonstrated. The maze consisted of complex connected paths
which ran either along a left–right axis or a front–back axis, and which led to eight
possible end points. The participant either pointed at or named the label for one of the
eight possible end points. During the practice trials, the participant did not rotate his/her
body between the stimulus presentation and the recall on the maze. Throughout the
experiment the participant did not manipulate the toy man. Two practice trials were
administered, and if necessary more practice trials were run, until the participant correctly
matched previously seen motion to recognized path.
In the experimental trials, a new maze, as shown in Fig. 3, printed on 27 cm by 27 cm
paper, was placed on the recall table (there was no maze on the presentation table). The
procedure was the same as the practice trials except for the following two points. First,
after the presentation of a path, the participants were asked to wait for 30 s, and then turned
around and walked to the recall table to respond. Secondly, no feedback was given to their
responses. At the beginning of the experimental trials, the participants were informed that
there would be multiple trials, and the toy man might end up in the same destination more
than once and some of the eight possible destinations might never be reached by the toy
man. If the participants could not remember the path, they were allowed to go back to the
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188168
Fig. 3. The maze on which the path was recalled in the Motion-maze task.
presentation table and see the motion again. This procedure was repeated five times, once
for each of the five paths in Fig. 2.
As in the previous experiment, none of the instructions contained any words denoting
spatial directions or locations. If a reference to a location or direction became necessary
during the training, deictic terms (‘here’, ‘this’) and pointing gestures were used.
4.1.1.5.2. Coding For each demonstrated motion, there were in fact two possible but
different solutions embedded in the maze of paths – one correct if the path was coded in
absolute terms, and one correct if coded in relative terms (due to the subjects’ rotation,
these paths ended up in distinct end points – see Fig. 1 for illustration). The response was
coded as ‘relative’ if the end location was A for Path 1, F for Path 2, C for Path 3, F for Path
4, and H for Path 5. The response was coded as ‘absolute’ if the end location was F for Path
1, A for Path 2, H for Path 3, A for Path 4, and C for Path 5.
4.1.1.6. Linguistic elicitation After the above two tasks, a linguistic task was administered.
The participant was shown two lateral mirror-image photos (two out of the six photos in
Fig. 3 in Pederson et al. (1998), with a man to the left of a tree vs. a tree to the left of a
man), which were arranged on the east–west axis. They were asked to describe each photo
so that somebody else could tell which picture was being described.
4.1.2. Results
(a) The results for the Animals-in-a-row task are displayed in Fig. 4. In the figure, zero
absolute response implies that all five trials were coded relative, except for one participant
in the outdoor condition who gave four relative responses and a response that was neither
absolute nor relative. The outdoor condition is compared to the ‘indoor blinds-up’ condiS.C.
Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 169
Fig. 4. Direction of animals in the Animals-in-a-row task with Dutch participants: Indoor and Outdoor conditions
(a total of five responses from each participant are coded either relative or absolute).
tion. The data from the indoor blinds-up condition consist of 20 participants drawn
randomly from the 38 Dutch participants in the earlier study reported in Pederson et al.
(1998).11
As is immediately clear, under both conditions a significant majority of the
participants had predominantly (three or more) relative responses: Indoor (Binomial,
p , 0:01), Outdoor (Binomial, p , 0:01). The mean number of absolute responses for
the indoor condition was 0.55 out of five trials (SD 1.31), and that for the outdoor condition
was 0.60 out of five trials (SD 0.88). There was no significant difference in the mean
number of absolute responses between participants in the outdoor condition and the indoor
condition (Mann–Whitney U-test, U ¼ 168, P ¼ :40). The difference is not significant
with the t-test, which is more sensitive, either (t-test, t ¼ 0:14, df ¼ 38, p ¼ :89).12
(b) The results from the more exacting Motion-maze task are shown in Fig. 5. Once
again in the figure, zero absolute response implies that all five trials were coded relative,
except for one participant in the outdoor condition who gave four relative responses and a
response that was neither absolute nor relative. The outdoor condition is again compared
to the ‘indoor blinds-up’ condition. The data for the indoor blinds-up condition consist of
ten participants drawn randomly from the Dutch participants in Levinson (in press). Under
both conditions, all the participants had predominantly (three or more) relative responses:
Indoor (Binomial, p , :01), Outdoor (Binomial, p , :01). The mean number of absolute
responses for the indoor condition was 0.05 out of five trials (SD 0.22), and that for the
outdoor condition was 0.25 out of five trials (SD 1.11). The mean numbers of absolute
responses do not significantly differ between the outdoor and indoor conditions (Mann–
Whitney U-test, U ¼ 200, p ¼ :99). The difference is not significant with the t-test, which
is more sensitive, either (t-test, t ¼ 0:78, df ¼ 38, p ¼ :44).
(c) The descriptions of the photographs were analyzed in terms of the key expression
that encodes the spatial relationship between the man and the tree, such as “to the right of”.
This analysis revealed that all participants used relative coding (but no absolute coding) in
language in the outdoor condition. The result is consistent with what has been reported
about Dutch speakers in Pederson et al. (1998) and Brown and Levinson (1993) and
congruent with the choice of relative coding in the Animals-in-a-row task and the
Motion-maze task.
4.1.3. Discussion
In both the Animals-in-a-row and the Motion-maze experiments, 95% of the participants
gave more relative responses than absolute responses in the outdoor and indoor
conditions. In accord with our predictions, this matches the choice of linguistic frame
of reference for the description of tabletop spatial relationships both indoors and outdoors
(as reported in Pederson et al., 1998). We do not find anything like the qualitative difference
between the results for the indoor and outdoor conditions that Li and Gleitman report
– their results showed a bimodal distribution, in which 35% of their participants gave no
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188170
11
Two of the 40 participants were excluded in that earlier experiment because they responded ‘monodirectionally’,
namely, using one fixed direction of response regardless of the direction of the stimulus.
12
Reconfirming the non-significance with the t-test for this result and the results for Figs. 5 and 8 was suggested
by one of the reviewers.
absolute responses and 40% of them produced only absolute responses (see their Fig. 7). In
short, we have been unable to replicate their results.
We will return to ask why we got such different results. But first, let us note that there
are non-significant trends in the data that could be interpreted as in accord with Li and
Gleitman’s hypothesis that landmark cues in outdoor settings lead to the use of the
absolute frame of reference. In both the Animals-in-a-row task and the Motion-maze
task, the outdoor condition indeed yielded a higher (but non-significant) mean number of
absolute responses. But it would be premature to conclude that this supports the Li and
Gleitman hypothesis. Firstly, in the case of the Motion-maze, the trend is entirely
contributed by one individual, who produced only absolute responses. (Incidentally,
there is also such a person in the indoor condition in the Animals-in-a-row task.)
Secondly, the outdoor condition introduces additional confounds: the outdoor experiments
were run (following Li and Gleitman) in the center of campus amidst the distractions
of passers-by, and direction errors in a relative frame of reference will get coded as
absolute in these tasks. The pattern of responses – a slight depression in relative performance
– is entirely compatible with this interpretation. Why is the effect more
pronounced in the Animals than in the Motion-maze task? Three independent variables
need to be remembered in the Animals task (identity, order and direction of animals),
and only one path in the Motion-maze task. Hence, the response in the Animals task may
be more fragile under distraction.
How can one explain the discrepancy between our study and that by Li and Gleitman?
One possibility is simply that the subject pool Li and Gleitman used in the University of
Pennsylvania is much more heterogeneous than our pool of subjects in the University of
Nijmegen – students no doubt come from all over the States and beyond, but Li and
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 171
Fig. 5. Motion-maze task with Dutch participants: Indoor and Outdoor conditions (a total of five responses by
each participant are coded either absolute or relative). Note: the two lines overlap at zero, two, three, and four
absolute responses.
Gleitman apparently screened their subject pool, which they characterize as “a single
cultural and linguistic subgroup” (p. 13), so this explanation seems unlikely.13
The second more plausible explanation is that Li and Gleitman’s simplified task was
simply too transparent to their participants,14
who attempted to second-guess the intentions
of the investigator. This interpretation is supported by the fact that 70% of their participants
in the blinds-up and outdoor conditions asked the experimenter which of the two
solutions they should choose, showing that they were aware of both. There are obvious
ways to test this explanation. In our original version of the Animals task, the focus of
participants was deflected from direction to identity and order – they had to recall which
three of four animals were lined up in which order, with direction as an implicit variable,
but the Li and Gleitman simplification (just three animals) and coding of direction without
order lost this aspect of the task. The other tasks we have used in our large cross-cultural
sample further background direction by embedding memory for direction in, for example,
a reasoning task (see Levinson, 1996b). A further manipulation is to increase the memory
load further, for example by placing a fourth animal in the sagittal plane, so that the
participant has to memorize an array on two axes (for example, cow, pig, horse in a
line heading left across the direction of view and sheep in front, occluding pig) – then a
real absolute response under 180 degree rotation will have the line heading right with the
sheep behind the row, occluded by the pig.15
Both embedding of direction-coding in a
larger task and increasing the difficulty of the task should avoid the meta-awareness
displayed by Li and Gleitman’s subjects – with the consequence we confidently predict,
that their subjects would act just like ours. Since unfortunately we cannot replicate their
results, we are unable to test this further. Instead we will turn to examine their Experiment
2b, and show that, contrary to their assumptions, this has nothing to do with an absolute
frame of reference.
4.2. Li and Gleitman’s ‘duck pond’ experiment
In explaining their motivations for their Experiment 2b, Li and Gleitman make clear that
they think that an absolute system is all about landmarks. True absolute systems have
nothing to do with landmarks – the geometry of such systems does not consist of lines
converging on a landmark, instead it has infinite parallel lines constituting an abstract
‘slope’ across an environment (see Levinson, 1996b, Fig. 4.9). Most cardinal direction
systems are abstractions off landscape features or off meteorological or celestial features,
but they are indeed abstractions. For example, although the Tenejapan Tzeltal system
names South as ‘uphill’, ‘uphill’ remains ‘uphill’ on the flat – it is a cardinal direction
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188172
13
There are anecdotal reports that Midwestern Americans utilize more cardinal directions in both language and
cognition than East Coast residents, though no studies have been conducted. Such a mix could in principle lead to
Li and Gleitman’s bimodal distribution, but again seems to have been ruled out by screening of subjects.
14
Furthermore, if Li and Gleitman’s participants were psychology students (they do not say), then clearly the
experimenter’s goals may have been clearer to them than to our participants from random faculties, who were
recruited at the site of the experiment.
15
Pilots in Tenejapa (Mexico) and Hopevale (Australia) show that absolute-speaking populations will do this.
We didn’t use this manipulation for the reasons explained – our tasks were run on some populations who had had
no schooling whatsoever, and we simplified all tasks to the minimum.
system in disguise.16
At night, in an alien city, facing a device never seen before (namely a
sink with two taps), one Tenejapan asked another, “Which is the hot tap, the uphill
(southern) or the downhill (northern) one?”. They maintain a constant sense of absolute
orientation, presumably by running a continuous background computation of egocentric
heading with respect to abstract bearings, integrating multiple internal and external cues to
achieve this.17
This is the phenomenon that we are trying to capture.
So what are the characteristics of a landmark system? Well, it no doubt depends on the
system. Some of them cover a vast territory and operate very much like absolute systems
(Austronesian inland/sea systems or Alaskan upstream/downstream systems are of this
type, see Levinson, 1996a). Others are local, and are more like very large intrinsic arrays:
if I have a mental map of the internal arrangements of a large building like a library or city
administration, but can’t orient this map in a larger landscape, I am operating with an
‘orientation-free’ representation as in the intrinsic frame in Table 1. Notice that for
intrinsic coding either the ground (or landmark) object or the figure (object to be located)
must have intrinsic features, as in “The animals are facing the pond”.
Li and Gleitman set out to ask in their Experiment 2b “Can landmark information, if it is
salient enough, completely determine the degree to which a single population solves
spatial-problems?”. As ‘landmarks’ they used ‘duck ponds’, big colorful symmetrical
objects. They placed one of these on both the stimulus and response tables of the same
Animals task as before: in their ‘relative’ condition they placed the duck ponds always to
the participants’ right on both tables; for the ‘absolute’ condition, they placed the ducks
always to the south of both tables (and thus with left/right alternation under rotation). The
results were that under the ‘absolute’ condition, participants lined up the animals facing
the duck ponds, and in the relative condition they did the same, with the animals in the
reverse direction.
One has to note immediately that these are obviously not ‘landmarks’ in any normal
sense, since identical objects are replicated in different locations (you don’t expect to have
clones of the local cathedral on neighboring streets!), and the landmark objects are clearly
relatively small and movable. Rather, they will be interpreted by participants as part of the
scene to be replicated. What participants clearly did was use the large, bright objects as an
orientational cue – they were treating the whole assemblage, both duck ponds and animals,
as one array to be reproduced. What kind of coordinate system is involved in maintaining
the internal arrangements of an array while its orientation is varied? An orientation-free
frame of reference of course – what we call an intrinsic frame of reference (see Levinson,
1996b, pp. 147ff). So what Li and Gleitman actually tested was whether they could bias
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 173
16
Interestingly, Tzeltal children seem to key into the abstract nature of the system relatively early, and they do
not seem to pass through a stage of using landmarks on the way (Brown, 2001; Brown & Levinson, 2000).
17
A reviewer asks how they do this. Unfortunately, we do not really know – verbal protocols suggest that deadreckoning
of current position by keeping track of turns and distances traversed is involved, and that many
environmental cues are constantly used to correct accumulated errors. But that these peoples maintain such a
‘mental compass’ is not in doubt. For some of the groups we have tested, by transporting individuals to unfamiliar
locations, the ability to point to unseen locations is quite spectacular, exceeding the accuracy of, for example,
‘homing pigeons’ initial flight paths over similar distances (see Levinson, in press, Chap. 6). This accurate sense
of direction correlates with the use of absolute frame of reference in language.
participants between the two frames of reference predominantly used in English, namely
the intrinsic and the relative, and they found they could. We would never have doubted
that they could do so (see Tversky, 1996 for the long tradition of research here). We only
predict that a true absolute frame of reference, if absent from ordinary language usage for
these kinds of ‘table top’ contexts, is hardly accessible to these participants for nonlinguistic
conceptual coding for similar arrays.
Can we directly demonstrate that an intrinsic frame of reference is what is involved, and
that the rival frame is relative? We needed first to replicate Li and Gleitman’s finding, then
vary the conditions, and this is what we did. We performed two experiments. Our Experiment
2 first replicated Li and Gleitman’s Experiment 2b under its so-called ‘absolute’ (our
intrinsic) condition, with an extra condition to test whether we could induce a relative
frame of reference while maintaining cues biasing to their ‘absolute’ frame of reference.
Our Experiment 3 was designed to demonstrate that an intrinsic frame of reference, not an
absolute one, is really what is at stake.
4.3. Experiment 2
We followed the procedure and setting of Li and Gleitman’s ‘absolute’ condition in
their Experiment 2b. It is a version of Animals-in-a-row with a pair of identical ‘landmarks’
(‘duck ponds’) given on both the presentation and recall table. We investigated the
choice of frames of reference under two conditions with different memory load. One
condition is the Three Animal condition, which precisely replicates the absolute condition
of Li and Gleitman’s Experiment 2b. At the recall table, participants are given just the
three animals used in the array on the presentation table. Thus, the participants have to
remember only the order and direction of animals, but not the identity of the animals used
in each trial. The other condition is the Four Animal condition, in which the participants
have to choose the three out of four possible animals at the recall table, according to the
animal types used in the stimulus. This is equivalent to our Experiment 1, and adds slightly
to the load on recall memory.
Our prediction was as follows. Dutch subjects have two frames of reference (intrinsic
and relative) available in language, and thus use just these two available frames also for
conceptual coding. However, both earlier linguistic and non-linguistic tasks had suggested
that for Dutch speakers the relative frame of reference is predominant (see, for example,
Levelt, 1996, p. 99). We therefore expected the very salient ‘duck pond’ cues to bias
towards the intrinsic frame, but the increased memory load to bias in the other direction,
toward the more habitual relative frame.
4.3.1. Method
4.3.1.1. Material Stimulus arrays were created using the same four plastic animals as in
Experiment 1. A pair of identical ‘duck ponds’ were used as ‘landmark’ cues on the
stimulus table and the recall table. Just as in Li and Gleitman’s experiment, they were
roughly circular (about 20 cm in diameter) and longitudinally symmetrical, and had
prominent bright colors, consisting of two yellow toy ducks fixed on a blue surface
representing a pond.
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188174
4.3.1.2. Setting and layout The setting and the layout for the experiment were recreated as
closely as possible to the ‘absolute’ condition in Li and Gleitman’s Experiment 2b.18
The
stimulus presentation table and the recall table were aligned to a north–south axis, and
were close enough to each other so that the participant could swivel his or her chair 180
degrees to face the recall table (as in Li and Gleitman’s corresponding experiment). One of
the duck ponds was placed in advance on the stimulus presentation table so that it was on
the participant’s right side when facing the table. On the recall table, the other duck pond
was also placed in advance of all trials, but now on the left side of the participant when
facing the table.
4.3.1.3. Participants Twenty student participants were recruited from the Max Planck
Institute participant pool. The participants were different from those in the other
experiments reported in this paper. They were paid 8.5 guilders each for their participation.
4.3.1.4. Procedure Half of the participants were randomly assigned to the Three Animal
condition, and the other half to the Four Animal condition. The procedure was essentially
the same as that for ‘Animals-in-a-row’ in our Experiment 1, except that the delay after the
removal of the stimulus was 15 s.
(a) In the Three Animal condition, the procedure was essentially equivalent to that of Li
and Gleitman’s Experiment 2b. In this condition, three animals were lined up on the
stimulus presentation table, and the same three animals were given to the participants at
the recall table to reconstruct the array.
(b) In the Four Animal condition, three animals were lined up on the stimulus presentation
table, and four animals were given to the participant at the recall table. Thus, the
participant had to choose the relevant three animals out of the four given, according to the
animals used in the stimulus.
4.3.1.5. Coding Five experimental responses were coded for either the intrinsic or relative
direction in which the animals were facing when rebuilt. The sequence of animals was also
recorded, to screen out the trials that were especially poorly remembered. When the
location of all the animals was wrong (for example, when the array cow–sheep–horse is
rebuilt as sheep–cow–horse), the trial was not considered.
4.3.2. Results
In the Three Animal condition, we obtained just the results that Li and Gleitman did,
namely the direction of recall was cued by the ‘duck pond’. But in the Four Animal
condition, with the greater memory load, participants ignored the ‘duck pond’ cues, and
reproduced the animals in a relative way, i.e. preserving left/right orientation. The results
are contrasted in Fig. 6 – in this figure we label what Li and Gleitman called ‘absolute’
codings as ‘intrinsic’ ones, for reasons that will become clear. Note that in the figure,
zero intrinsic response implies that all five trials were coded relative, and vice-versa, thus
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 175
18
A difference was that our experiment was carried out in a room without any window, while in Li and
Gleitman’s version the room had windows and blinds were up. However, here this variable was incidental and
not a controlled condition in their experiment.
the full five intrinsic responses imply that for those participants no relative responses
were produced. The mean number of intrinsic responses in the Three Animal condition
was 3.8 (SD 2.04) out of five trials, and that in the Four Animal condition was 1.0 (SD
1.89). The difference between the two means is significant (Mann–Whitney U-test,
U ¼ 19, p , :01).
4.3.3. Discussion
This experiment establishes that the result in Li and Gleitman’s Experiment 2b is
replicable (unlike their Experiment 2a) – but we think that the participants used the
intrinsic frame of reference to code the array. The result for the Four Animal condition
is interesting. It shows that despite the prominent cues, what we suppose to be an intrinsic
result is fragile: as soon as the memory load is upgraded slightly, it appears that participants
revert to their habitual, predominantly relative way of coding spatial scenes. The
above result also throws light on Li and Gleitman’s Experiment 2a: as we suggested above,
we predict that if they upgrade the memory load, participants will not be able to engage in
the second-guessing behavior that we suspect underlies their ‘absolute’ result, and will
react in a relative way.
4.4. Experiment 3: the ‘duck pond’ experiment under 90 degree rotation
We now attempt to show experimentally what we have already argued conceptually,
namely that the Li and Gleitman ‘absolute’ condition is nothing of the kind, but just an
intrinsic condition. To do that, we need to use the ‘orientation-free’ character of intrinsic
arrays (see Table 1), so we ran the same ‘duck pond’ experiment as in their Experiment 2b
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188176
Fig. 6. Animals-in-a-row task with duck pond ‘landmarks’ with Dutch participants: Three and Four Animal
conditions (a total offive responses from each participant are coded either intrinsic or relative). Note: the two lines
overlap at two and three intrinsic responses.
Condition 1, but under a 90 degree rather than a 180 degree rotation. Then we can compare
the two conditions.
Let us clarify the reasoning. An intrinsically-coded array is orientation-free in the sense
that only its internal arrangement has to be preserved – in this case animals facing towards
or away from the ‘duck pond’. Both an intrinsic and absolute solution can look the same
under 180 degree rotation – that is, the participant may be thinking “animals facing duck
pond” (intrinsic) or equally “animals facing north” (absolute). The intrinsic and absolute
solutions can become separated under any rotation, but since the intrinsic solution by
definition can be in any direction, it will tend to be oriented by local ecological factors,
like the main axis of the table, and viewpoint-preserving factors, like egocentrically
transverse vs. sagittal arrangement. Thus, under 180 degree rotation with a duck pond
at one end of the table and the main axis of the table in the egocentric transverse, they will
tend to align. But if we now put the recall table at 90 degrees to the stimulus table, the
absolute solution will require a sagittal alignment away from the participant in response to
a transverse stimulus, while the intrinsic solution is likely to be influenced by ad hoc
factors, like the main axis of the table or preservation of the transverse viewpoint. Thus,
the two frames of reference should now separate. Our prediction of course is that what Li
and Gleitman are calling an absolute response is in fact coded intrinsically by participants
like theirs or ours.
4.4.1. Method
The material, the setting, and the procedure were identical to the Three Animal condition
in Experiment 2. The layout was the only difference. The stimulus presentation table
and the recall table were arranged at a 90 degree angle. Thus, the participant swiveled the
chair 90 degrees rather than 180 degrees, as in Fig. 7 (the layout with 180 degree rotation
in Experiment 2 is also shown but dotted for comparison).
4.4.1.1. Participants Ten participants were recruited from the Max Planck Institute
participant pool. The participants were different from those in any other experiments
reported in this paper. They were paid 8.5 guilders each for their participation.
4.4.1.2. Coding Five experimental responses were coded for either intrinsic (towards or
away from the duck pond) or absolute direction (fixed compass bearing) in which the
animals were facing when rebuilt. The sequence of animals was also noted to allow poorly
remembered trials to be discarded (for example, when the array cow–sheep–horse was
rebuilt as sheep–cow–horse). Note that the location of the duck pond on the recall table
was such that a relative response was not possible.
4.4.2. Results
The results are depicted in Fig. 8, which charts the 90 degree condition against the
matching 180 degree condition (i.e. the Three Animal condition in our Experiment 2).
Along the x-axis we now have number of intrinsic trials, that is the trials which preserve a
direction headed to or away from the ‘duck pond’ cue. In the figure, the full five intrinsic
responses imply that for those participants no absolute responses were produced in the
case of the 90 degree condition, and that no relative responses were produced in the case of
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 177
the 180 degree condition. It is clear that in the 90 degree condition the great majority of
trials did NOT align sagittally (which would have allowed an absolute interpretation), but
were oriented intrinsically. The majority of the participants had three or more intrinsic
responses (Binomial, p ¼ :11).
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188178
Fig. 7. The layout of Experiment 3.
Fig. 8. Animals-in-a-row task with duck pond ‘landmarks’ with Dutch participants: 180 degree and 90 degree
conditions (a total of five responses from each participant are coded either intrinsic or absolute). Note: the 180
degree condition in this figure plots the same data as the Three Animal condition in Fig. 6. The two lines overlap
at zero, one, two, and three intrinsic responses.
The mean number of intrinsic responses in the 90 degree condition was 3.7 (SD 2.00)
out of five trials, and that in the 180 degree condition was 3.8 (SD 2.04). There is no
significant difference between the two means (Mann–Whitney U-test, U ¼ 46, p ¼ :74).
The difference is not significant with the t-test, which is more sensitive, either (t-test,
t ¼ 0:11, df ¼ 18, p ¼ 0:91). This strongly suggests that behavior under both conditions
comes from the same source: an intrinsic coding. If you pool the participants from both
conditions, a significant majority of participants had three or more intrinsic responses
(Binomial, p , :01).
4.4.3. Discussion
The result of Experiment 3 makes it clear that what Li and Gleitman called ‘absolute’
responses in their Duck-on-tables experiment (their Experiment 2b) and the predominant
responses in the Three Animal condition in our Experiment 2 were in fact
intrinsic responses. For our Dutch participants it takes low memory load, together
with prominent local cues which can easily be construed as forming a single array with
the test objects, to induce a switch from the relative to the intrinsic frame of ref-
erence.
Both English and Dutch are languages which (in most dialects anyway) offer two frames
of reference in common parlance: namely both intrinsic and relative. Of these two, relative
is predominant. For example, in an abstract description task – neutral over real scale or real
objects – Levelt (1996, p. 99) found that less than 25% of Dutch participants were verbally
consistent intrinsic coders, and Li and Gleitman report similar figures. Still, both frames of
reference are perfectly colloquial. Thus, on the hypothesis that language correlates with
and influences cognition, we would predict that both frames of reference may be used in
non-verbal coding, with the relative frame predominant. The results from the two duck
pond experiments taken together indeed indicate once again a language–cognition correlation,
here in terms of linguistically favored frame of reference and most robust frame of
reference in memory. As a reviewer points out, to establish that this correlation has a
causal interpretation would take a further demonstration, and a first step would be to show
that cross-culturally linguistic preference always correlates with a default, robust frame of
reference in memory.
It is nevertheless important to re-emphasize that Dutch and English speakers switching
between the intrinsic and relative frames of reference is compatible with the hypothesis.
Thus, contrary to what Li and Gleitman argue, “showing that speakers of a single
language …can be induced to vary in their spatial reasoning strategy by changing the
circumstances of test” (p. 290) does not constitute counter-evidence to the hypothesis
under investigation.
5. Distinguishing the absolute and intrinsic frames of reference
A fundamental problem with Li and Gleitman’s study is that they do not make the
necessary distinctions between frames of reference. They consistently equate our ‘absolute’
frame with the higher-order classification ‘allocentric’ (pp. 268–270), thinking that
the ‘intrinsic’ frame of reference is a kind of ‘absolute’. But in fact, as we must now show,
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 179
the intrinsic frame and the absolute frame have crucially different properties. First, they
have quite different logical properties. As Levelt (1989) has pointed out, the intrinsic
frame of reference does not support transitive inference, while the relative and, we may
add, the absolute ones do. The inference “Abel is north of Beth, Beth is north of Cain,
therefore Abel is north of Cain” is valid. But the corresponding inference when interpreted
intrinsically, “Abel is at Beth’s left, Beth is at Cain’s left, therefore Abel is at Cain’s left”
is invalid – it will be true only if Abel, Beth and Cain happen to be facing the same way.
Second, as pointed out in the previous section, the rotational properties of absolute and
intrinsic codings are fundamentally distinct: absolute codings of arrays are made in terms
of fixed bearings that have nothing to do with the array itself, while intrinsic codings are
based on array-internal relationships, and are hence invariant to the rotation of the whole
array. There is no sense, then, in which the intrinsic frame is a kind of absolute frame.19
Further, and crucially for the matter in hand, there is no translation possible from intrinsic
coding to absolute or relative coding (or from relative to absolute) – that is, there is no way
to convert information from, for example, an intrinsic or relative coding to an absolute one
(at least, without ancillary information; see Levinson, 1996b, pp. 152–158 for the demonstration).
It is this lack of inter-translatability between frames of reference that guarantees
a congruence between linguistic coding and the coding people use in non-linguistic
memory.
From Li and Gleitman’s conflation of the intrinsic and absolute frames of
reference numerous confusions follow. First, as we have shown, they misinterpret their
own experimental findings. Second, they think that the presence of ‘landmarks’ as a
cue is the defining characteristic of ‘absolute’ frames of reference, whereas in fact
absolute systems proper make no use of a system of landmarks. A landmark system
presupposes a radial geometry – if I left my car facing towards the tower, that
doesn’t tell me which side of the tower to look for it (unlike remembering that I
left it north of the tower). Another feature of a landmark system is that the system applies
only in a delimited area. Take the example of expressions, uptown, downtown, and
crosstown, used in Manhattan Island of New York City. According to our informants
from New York City, the application of these terms is strictly limited to directions and
locations on Manhattan Island.20
For example, once you cross Brooklyn Bridge
from Manhattan into Brooklyn, suddenly the same absolute directions cannot be referred
to by these terms at all. These expressions are thus analogous to the word front in expressions
like the front row of a theater within the intrinsic frame of reference: outside
the theatre, the frame is irrelevant, just as are uptown, downtown when you cross over
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188180
19
Nor is there a sense in which the absolute frame is a kind of intrinsic one, a possibility raised by a reviewer,
who questions whether an absolute frame is not simply an intrinsic frame where the ‘ground’ is the local terrain.
This may indeed be the right characterization of landmark systems (a point taken up below), but for all the logical
and rotational reasons just explained, it cannot be a correct analysis of a true absolute system using abstract fixed
bearings or cardinal directions.
20
Thanks to Jennie Pyers and Aida Radican for sharing their insights about how people describe directions and
locations in New York City.
the river to Brooklyn – the terms are allocentric but not absolute, as Li and Gleitman
suggest.21
Absolute systems presuppose a conceptual ‘slope’, or series of infinite parallel lines
across the environment. You can’t walk around such a conceptual slope, in the way you
can walk around a tower. The two systems have long been distinguished in studies of
navigation: absolute systems are involved in dead-reckoning, landmarks in piloting, and
they involve quite different procedures (Gallistel, 1990). Third, Li and Gleitman therefore
imagine that the linguistic and conceptual systems under investigation as ‘absolute’ by our
project are entirely familiar to English speakers, who, they suggest, could at the drop of a
hat say “Give me the spoon that’s northeast of your teacup” (p. 7). They can’t because they
can’t routinely compute it, anymore than they can instantly give you their telephone
numbers in binary code. But the ‘absolute’ language populations we have been interested
in do routinely use such statements, can instantly compute them, and remember everything
of whatever scale in terms of the locally relevant conceptual slope, as can be shown not
only through memory experiments but also by examining their unconscious gestures
during speaking. This is a truly interesting phenomenon, of considerable importance to
our understanding of the ‘psychic unity’ of the species, and nothing is gained by shoving it
under a terminological rug.
This conflation of absolute and intrinsic frames of reference vitiates the relevance of
Li and Gleitman’s discussion of the animal and infant literature. They suggest that
humans are just like rats, in that rats show sensitive use of the best spatial cues, thus
being absolute- or relative-coders on demand. But the literature does not support this.
First, it is false that “when provided with sufficiently rich and stable landmark cues, any
self-respecting rodent will use them” (p. 22) – this was conclusively shown by Cheng
and Gallistel, for rats are only attuned to geometrical information, ignoring color, pattern
and other rich landmark cues (see Gallistel, 1990, Chap. 6). Human use of landmarks is
strikingly different in its multi-modality, rat-like behavior being rapidly superceded in
infancy, just as language is being acquired and plausibly linked to its multi-modal
semantics (Spelke & Tsivkin, 2001). Secondly, rats show no absolute fixed-bearing
sense of direction as far as is known – they may use landmarks to form a ‘centroid’
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 181
21
English also of course has the words north, south, east, and west, which are defined in terms of an absolute
frame of reference. However, there are plenty of signs that in ordinary American or British parlance these are not
used as their counterparts are in languages like Guugu Yimithirr or Tzeltal, which lack a relative frame of
reference. First, they are scarcely ever used on a smaller than geographic scale (a boy who used them inside a
house was thought worthy of a note in Science in 1931). Second, these terms are more likely to invoke mental
representations based on the relative and intrinsic frames of reference, perhaps in accord with how they are
acquired, for it seems likely that these notions are acquired largely through the practice of map reading, which
involves the convention of north being up, west being left, etc., i.e. representations within the relative frame of
reference. For example, when an American English speaker in New York hears a statement such as Laos is west of
Vietnam, she does not imagine a direction west of where she is, but rather a direction to the left on an imaginary
map. Furthermore, some speakers may have another layer of meaning, based on the intrinsic frame of reference,
defined by a network of local landmarks. This supports knowledge such as If I drive down Broadway from Times
Square to Harlem, I am heading north. This kind of directional knowledge is strictly local as we saw in the
expressions such as uptown in Manhattan. Thus, for all spatial computational purposes, the cardinal direction
terms may be based on the relative and intrinsic frames of reference for many English speakers.
from which other locations can be calculated, but this will change as each new landmark
is discovered (O’Keefe, 1993). Thus, rats have allocentric systems of orientation, but not
(as far as is known) absolute ones of the kind at stake here. In contrast, numerous
arthropods and bird species do have absolute senses of direction, utilizing in-built polarized
light receptors and magnetoreception – ‘hardware’ apparently denied to terrestrial
mammals (Hughes, 1999), but successfully mimicked in ‘software’ by humans of certain
groups, or by technology in others (Levinson, in press). So, once again, nothing is gained
by conflation of distinct frames of reference in the study of animal cognition. And the
same goes for the study of infant orientation, where the proper frame of reference
distinctions could be most helpful. But here again, there is not the slightest evidence
from the literature for genuine absolute responses in Western infants – even landmarkcued
allocentric behavior being perhaps derived from transformations of egocentric
information (Pick, 1993, p. 35).
Finally, Li and Gleitman advance the hypothesis that the results of our cross-cultural
studies could be explained by supposing that the small-scale, unschooled, traditional
societies who use absolute systems share familiar landmarks, because in effect they live
together. This idea is not in accord with the ethnography (for example, our hunter-gatherer
groups are far-flung wanderers, the Tenejapans do not live “in a village on a hill” but have
a dispersed settlement pattern over a large territory), nor could it be determinative since
there are lots of small, localized human groups who do not use absolute systems of spatial
reckoning. But the main reason the hypothesis will not fly is that landmark cues do not play
any special role in absolute systems like the Tzeltal or Arrernte systems. If you transport
individuals from these communities out of their familiar territories, their ‘downhill’ or
‘north’ remains anchored to the same fixed bearing (in our compass degrees) that it always
had (see Levinson, 1996c, in press for the experiments).
6. Conclusions
Our critique of the Li and Gleitman paper is based on the following points:
1. Li and Gleitman did not make the fundamental conceptual distinctions between frames
of reference, conflating ‘absolute’ and ‘intrinsic’ frames of reference.
2. As a result they have misinterpreted their own results: they have not discovered that
they can systematically induce American students to code absolutely – what they have
shown in their Experiment 2b is that they can bias them to switch between their own
language-correlated frames of reference, intrinsic and relative. We showed this by a
simple 90 degree rotation variant (our Experiment 3). All in all, no environmental
manipulations shake our Dutch speakers, at least, out of the two frames of reference
available in their language.
3. In the outdoor condition in our indoor-vs.-outdoor experiment, we did not replicate the
bimodal distribution with two equally high peaks for participants with predominant
relative responses and those with absolute responses, which Li and Gleitman obtained
in their Experiment 2a. We think they only got the results they got because they
simplified the experiment to the point where participants were second-guessing the
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188182
experimenter’s intention. It would be interesting to see if their results in the outdoor
condition could be replicated with a full battery of tasks, including the Motion-maze
and the Transitivity task (reported in Brown & Levinson, 1993; Levinson, 1996b), in
which directionality as the issue at stake is much more opaque, being embedded in a
more complicated task.
4. Their paper was based on erroneous assumptions about our findings: there was no
conflation of variables ‘outdoor condition’ and ‘absolute language’ as imagined
(some of our absolute results were obtained in a room without any windows, and
some of our relative ones were obtained in outdoor conditions). Nor incidentally are
the other confounds we are accused of valid for the larger study.22
Li and Gleitman
make a number of further erroneous assumptions, which we cannot correct here, about
the ecological and ethnographic backgrounds of the populations we have investigated –
the reader should see Levinson (in press) for accurate information. Here we have
concentrated on just one issue, the proper analysis of frames of reference and how to
experimentally investigate them.
As far as we can see then, our original hypothesis still stands. Not all languages make use
of all frames of reference, and the differential use in language predicts the use in nonlinguistic
tasks. For the reasons we listed in Section 2, we think the correlation suggests
that language influences the choice of frames of reference in non-linguistic tasks. But
there remains a puzzle: where do the three abstract types of frames of reference come
from? As mentioned at the outset, there are many innate neurological and physiological
bases governing the relation of an organism to its environment, and these no doubt
provide rudiments for the three frames of reference. But these are low-level perceptual
and motoric systems, and it is quite another thing to have these available at a conceptual
level.
Landau and Gleitman (1985) suggest that ‘natural categories’ for lexicalization can be
recognized during language acquisition because they should display four crucial properties:
(i) they should be learnt early in development (well before, say, age 3); (ii) in the
course of learning, one should not be able to detect attempts to construe the relevant terms
in other, but related, ways; (iii) they should be universally coded in all languages in the
‘core vocabulary’; (iv) even under poor input conditions (as where the child has perceptual
deficits), they should nevertheless be learnable. By such criteria, there is no evidence that
any of the frames of reference are ‘natural categories’ at a conceptual level – (iii) does not
hold for a start, and all the acquisition evidence points to relatively late learning. Western
children learn the intrinsic frame first, but this is not mastered in production till nearly 4
years of age (Johnston & Slobin, 1979, p. 538) and relative ‘left’/‘right’ not till as late as
11 (Piaget, 1928; Weissenborn & Stralka, 1984). Interestingly, Tzeltal children learn the
absolute system at least as early as the intrinsic system, but again not before 4 years of age,
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 183
22
For example, Li and Gleitman suggest a confound with literacy (pp. 287–288). As we stated above, we had
earlier checked for statistical correlations with literacy, age, sex, or indices of culture-change, and found very
little (Levinson, in press; Levinson & Nagy, 1998). There is no general correlation between literacy or years of
schooling in our sample.
and the system is not mastered fully till about age 7, and they never learn a linguistic
relative system (Brown & Levinson, 2000). The pattern is one of slow development right
through middle childhood: higher level conceptual representations are constructed late in
ontogenesis, in accord with experience and language exposure.
Putting all the facts together, the best account seems to be along the lines of the Karmiloff-Smith
(1992) ‘representational redescription’, whereby during the course of development
innate predispositions are progressively reworked into higher level conceptual
representations in response to environmental input, so that they become available for a
broader range of computation. We argue that language is part of such environmental input
driving representational redescription. How does this work?
Notions that are linguistically labeled need to be acquired due to their language specificity.
Not all absolute linguistic systems are the same. In Tzeltal, ‘downhill’ means the
quadrant centered on N 3458 independent of the local slope, whereas in Guugu Yimithirr,
‘north’ means the quadrant centered on N 178 (and in other systems axes may not be
orthogonal, nor arcs of 90 degrees; see Levinson, in press). Nor are all relative linguistic
systems conceptually identical. ‘In front of’ in Hausa semantically unifies a part of what
English front means (as in ‘in front of me’) and a part of what English behind means (as in
‘behind the tree’) (Levinson, in press).
These notions are acquired from matchings of language to situations, where the
analysis of those situations may be given either in earlier acquired notions or in simple
universal computational primitives (axes, angles, vectors) which have bases in perceptual-motor
systems. During this process, a particular type of representation, say a spatial
representation based on the absolute frame of reference, is repeatedly employed in the
service of the linguistic system. This leads not only to the eventual acquisition of the
lexicalized notion, but also to the general privileged status of the representational
system that supports the notion. In other words, the representational system becomes
readily available for all conceptual purposes, both linguistic and non-linguistic. In this
fashion, representational redescription bootstraps us from simpler notions to complex,
culture-specific wholes, and it also makes a particular type of representation readily
available for conceptual purposes. Under this view, universals do not lie in the exact
character of the higher conceptual systems, but just in the fact that expressions of
frames of reference in various languages seem to belong to the three main abstract
types (absolute, relative and intrinsic), suggesting universal low-level perceptual
systems as an ultimate source.
This of course is not at all the view that Li and Gleitman are trying to defend. Let us
examine their post-Fodorean doctrine in a little more detail. It has two parts: (a) the idea
that all our linguistic categories are direct projections from pre-existing biologicallydetermined
concepts (p. 266), and hence “all languages are broadly similar”(p. 266);
(b) the idea that linguistic coding can have no cognitive efficacy or cognitive effects.
We think the (a) part is, taken literally, clearly untenable – is the claim really that Japanese
honorifics, Russian aspect, Bantu noun classes and French gender are biologically-determined
concepts, and that American Sign Language is really “broadly similar in grammar
and lexicon” to American English? We suspect that most such opinions are ill-informed
about the range of linguistic diversity – it is, for example, extremely difficult to find even a
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188184
few shared concepts that all languages lexicalize (many languages do not, for example,
lexicalize terms equivalent to our ‘red’, ‘father’, ‘if’ or ‘earth’).
But when it comes to (b), we doubt that many scholars would on reflection agree that
linguistic coding has no cognitive effects. Even Fodor was – while promulgating an
extreme variant of (a) – careful to deny (b):
I am not committed to asserting that an articulate organism has no cognitive advantage
over an inarticulate one. Nor … is there any need to deny the Whorfian point
that the kinds of concepts one has may be profoundly determined by the character of
the natural language one speaks. … there is no principled reason why the experiences
involved in learning a natural language should not have a specially deep effect
in determining how the resources of the inner language are exploited. (Fodor, 1975/
1992, p. 389)
A great range of commonsense observation and the whole of the history of science shows
that the character of a representation system can make a profound computational difference
– witness, for example, Arabic numerals over Roman ones. A language provides its
learners with a rich but unique representation system, which affords some cognitive
operations, enforces others, and inhibits the development of yet further notions. Careful
studies have established, for example, that having a verbal color distinction makes a
difference to color perception (Kay & Kempton, 1984), or that speaking a language with
vs. without number distinctions has effects on the likelihood of perceiving and memorizing
quantities in the world (Lucy, 1992b). In the spatial domain, an absolute fixedbearing
system radically changes the computational character of mental maps
(McNaughton, Chen, & Markus, 1990). Recent work in Li and Gleitman’s own territory
suggests that language may play a key role in human cognitive development (see, for
example, Spelke and Tsivkin (2001) and other papers in Bowerman and Levinson
(2001)). Finally, to understand how language could have an effect on cognition, no
outlandish mechanisms need be supposed. To drive a car, you need to acquire new
motoric and cognitive skills. To speak Tzeltal, you’ll need to be able to do base-20
math in the head, since it has a vintegesimal number system, and more relevantly, you’ll
constantly need to maintain a mental compass, since ‘downhill’ denotes a quadrant based
on c. N 3458, for without that notion you can’t describe where anything is. Further, a
central mechanism responsible for the cognitive efficacy of language is provided by one
of the corner-stones of cognitive psychology, namely Miller’s coding theory of shortterm
memory limitations (Cowan, 2001; Miller, 1956). Languages are prodigal providers
of the ‘chunks’, the recodings, that get us around the bottleneck of short-term memory
limitations (as Miller pointed out; see also Levinson, 1997b). Language-specific chunks
thus come to play a central role in our thinking. Resistance to this humble truth –
linguistically-motivated categories pervade, change and facilitate our thought – is
puzzling. Overall, then, we can see neither empirical basis nor theoretical reasoning in
favor of the particular position that Li and Gleitman espouse.
What is the alternative? There are no doubt many views consistent with the evidence
in hand, but our own position is the following. Languages differ greatly in the semantic
distinctions they make. Speakers of these languages can be shown to code for memory
and inference in non-linguistic tasks in a manner congruent with those language-specific
S.C. Levinson et al. / Cognition 84 (2002) 155–188 185
distinctions. Consequently, we suppose that the non-linguistic representation systems
used in memory and inference are systematically influenced by the language spoken.
We do not think this so surprising, for semantic distinctions require cognitive support,
and maintaining a code for memory congruent with the language one speaks will facilitate
speaking about any retrieved memory. Such a position is of course consistent with
the existence of linguistic and cognitive universals, and with many language-independent
aspects of cognition, but it suggests that the languages we inherit and, in a minor way,
contribute to, provide us with a wealth of concepts that we would not otherwise have
arrived at. The transformative power of those accumulated concepts can be seen both in
conceptual development in the individual and in the history of cultures.
Acknowledgements
We thank David Wilkins for his original suggestions regarding the experiments, and
Carlien de Witte, Menno Jonker, and Wilma Jongejan for helping in data collection. We
would also like to acknowledge two anonymous referees who insisted on the clarification
of our arguments.
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