Causality Across Languages

Causality is a key aspect of cognition. Our minds bring order to the flux of experience by relating observed events to one another as causes and effects. This is an indispensible prerequisite to explaining past events and predicting future one. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have long puzzled over the cognitive basis of our ability to attribute cause-effect relations. A question of fundamental concern is which aspects of causal cognition are invariant across human populations and thus may have an innate basis, and which are learned and subject to cross-cultural variation. This project aims to contribute to answering this question, using primarily language as a window into causal cognition. The principal objective is the first large-scale comparison of how speakers of different languages categorize causal chains for the purposes of describing them. The project will help discern the criteria by which speakers choose from among the expressive options available to them when representing causal chains. These options have been shown to vary enormously across languages. Furthermore, the encoding of causal relations is a key aspect of the grammatical structure of human language, and the project will make important empirical contributions to the theory of the "syntax-semantics interface", the mapping between form and meaning in language. It also includes the largest-scale investigation to date of how language interfaces with nonlinguistic cognition in the representation of causality. An international team of 28 experienced field researchers will investigate the representation of causality across 29 languages belonging to 26 language families and spoken on six continents. A large set of video clips depicting event sequences that may or may not be causally related will be created. Descriptions of these clips under various controlled conditions will be collected from at least 12 speakers per language. The researchers will probe the meaning and structure of the descriptions, testing crosslinguistic predictions in the process. A nonverbal categorization experiment will test how participants conceptualize causal relations when they do not talk about them, with the objective of studying to what degree internal thought and verbal representations of causality align.