Doctoral Dissertation Research: A cross-linguistic study of the cognitive representation of part-whole structures in Mesoamerican languages

Does language influence thought? Do linguistic categories influence cognitive categories? Such questions remain the subject of controversy. This dissertation project includes a set of psycholinguistic experiments designed to address this foundational issue by studying how the parts of physical objects are represented in language and thought. In the languages of central and southern Mexico, body part terms commonly serve as general-purpose terms for the parts of any arbitrary object. It has been proposed that there are basic differences in how words are assigned to parts in these languages. In Juchitán Zapotec, many terms are assigned based on the part's position in the entire object, whereas in Tseltal Maya, the assignment process takes local shape into account. English part terms, on the other hand, are thought to be more influenced by the function of the part. In order to test whether speakers of different languages show measurable differences in their cognitive processing of parts and wholes, speakers of Juchitán Zapotec, Tseltal, and English will be presented with unfamiliar 3-D stimuli and asked to compare the parts. The participants' reaction times will be measured in order to determine whether some stimuli are more difficult to compare than others. In other tasks, the participants will be interviewed to get a fuller picture of how they use part terms. This research will also contribute to the documentation of cultural practices and lexical knowledge of the speakers of two indigenous languages of the Americas. The project will enhance international collaboration between researchers in Mexico and the U.S., and collaboration across the disciplines of linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. Finally, this research will be an important part of a graduate student's training as a scholar, providing field work experience with two additional indigenous languages.