Language and thought

A longstanding question in cognitive science and philosophy is whether the primary function of human language is thinking or communication. In this presentation, I suggest that the answer is communication. I first provide evidence for this conclusion from brain imaging and brain damage. With respect to the imaging evidence, Ev Fedorenko’s lab has established that a language cortical network can be identified in each of our brains in only 15 minutes of scanning in fMRI, by contrasting language with a control task, like reading non-words, or listening to a language that you don’t understand (Fedorenko, Ivanov & Regev, 2024, Nature Reviews Neuroscience). Fascinatingly, this network does not respond to anything except language (e.g., Fedorenko, Piantadosi & Gibson, 2024, Nature). That is, the language network doesn’t respond to anything that you might think of as complex thought, other than language, such as music, social reasoning, arithmetic, spatial reasoning, even understanding computer code, or gesturing (in a non-conventionalized way). Second, I will summarize research from my lab (e.g., Gibson et al., 2019) and others that shows that human languages appear to be well-designed for communicative purposes. Third, given this background, I will discuss whether different languages might lead to different kinds of thinking. I discuss evidence from the domains of number and color labels across languages. I conclude that storing and retrieving particularly culturally-relevant concepts can be easier in one language vs. another (Levinson, 2003b; Cantlon & Piantadosi, 2024), but a particular language is not needed in order to acquire any concepts.