Doctoral Dissertation Research: Spatial Language and Cognition in Bilingual Minds

How do people conceptualize and describe space? They can choose from a variety of strategies to delineate the location of an object, using for instance the directions where the sun rises/sets, projecting their own body axes onto the object, or introducing another object as landmark. These descriptions provide an opportunity to probe into the way people think and talk about space as a cultural practice shared among the members of a speech community. Linguists and psychologists are particularly interested in the factors that influence the selection among such strategies. Language, cultural factors such as education and literacy, and environmental variables such as topography and population geography have all been hypothesized to play a potential role in this process. A critical but understudied question in this connection is the impact of bilingualism. If the language a person speaks influences how they represent space cognitively, then speakers of multiple languages might think in ways that differ from how monolinguals think. Such hypothetical effects offer an opportunity to gain rich and detailed information about the role of language in cognition. This project focuses on Taiwan to explore the effect of language, culture and environment on the way monolingual and bilingual speakers represent space in language and cognition. Due to its migration history, Taiwan can be considered a natural linguistic laboratory with a great amount of variation among bilingual speakers in terms of age, education and residential neighborhoods. The test languages, Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Southern Min, a distant cousin of Mandarin, exhibit very distinct features and practices of use in spatial reference. The project will document the use of spatial descriptions by monolingual and bilingual speakers of these languages and study the impact of the first and second language, education, literacy, and the environment on spatial cognition