Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Investigations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis often ask whetherthere is a difference in the non-linguistic behavior of speak-ers of two languages, generally without modeling the underly-ing process. Such an approach leaves underexplored the rela-tive contributions of language and universal aspects of cogni-tion, and how those contributions differ across languages. Weexplore the naming and non-linguistic pile-sorting of spatialscenes across speakers of five languages via a computationalmodel grounded in an influential proposal: that language willaffect cognition when non-linguistic information is uncertain.We report two findings. First, native language plays a smallbut significant role in predicting spatial similarity judgmentsacross languages, consistent with earlier findings. Second, thesize of the native-language role varies systematically, such thatfiner-grained semantic systems appear to shape similarity judg-ments more than coarser-grained systems do. These findingscapture the tradeoff between language-specific and universalforces in cognition, and how that tradeoff varies across lan-guages.