LANGUAGE-THOUGHT · Differences in language structures as a guide to studying cross-cultural differences in cognition: gender and articles
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2005-09-01 → 2007-08-31
- EU contribution
- €0
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- EIF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners. CORDIS does not always give exact coordinates for projects before 2014. These points are placed at city or country level.
Project objective
The issue of relation between language and cognition is again, after decades of a relative abandonment, in the centre of scientific interest. Results of recent studies suggest that people from different cultures may differ more in their cognition than previously thought, and that language does indeed provide us with good clues as to where to look for those differences. In most research language is even indicated as a causal force, which, by influencing our cognition from early childhood, brings about differences in our habits of categorisation, processes of remembering, and conceptualisation of basic cognitive domains such as time, or spatial relations.The main aim of this project is to contribute to this line of research: to investigate new possible areas of differences, to develop new research methods, and, on a more theoretical level to deepen the understanding of mechanisms involved in the emergence of such differences. A series of experiments has been designed, in which cognitive correlates of two differences between Polish and Italian will be studied: gender and articles. The choice of research topic was dictated by: clear structural differences between Polish and Italian, the social importance of the gender category, and the fact that articles are absent in Polish and other Slavic languages and are very difficult to learn by speakers of those languages. I would like to conduct those studies at the University of Bologna and Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici, Italy, where I hope to benefit from extensive theoretical, methodological and empirical background of Prof. Nicoletta Caramelli in research on conceptual structure.At the theoretical level, I would like to continue my work on a framework in which language changes and cross-cultural variations may be encompassed. This would be greatly aided by participating in the activities of SSSUB as well as the consultations with its director, Prof. Umberto Eco.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNACoordinatorCity levelItaly
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union