Semester question: “How does language make a difference?”
This semester, the University of Vienna's semester question focuses on the impact of language. Read Soonja Choi's univie blog entry and Ulrich Ansorge's user article on derStandard.at on how language shapes our world!
New paper
Our paper 'Whereof one cannot speak: How language and capture of visual attention interact' was published in Cognition! Read the full paper here
Welcome to our project 'How language shapes perception and cognition: A contrastive study of space and evidentiality in German and Korean'
The project is funded by the Vienna Science and Technology Fund ('Wiener Wissenschafts-, Forschungs- und Technologiefonds') and scheduled for the period June 2016 to June 2019.
The team led by Ulrich Ansorge (PI) and Soonja Choi (co-PI) consists of psychologists and linguists with a background in vision science, cognitive science, semantics, cross-linguistic comparisons and child language development. The project is hosted in Vienna (Austria), but collaborates with researchers in Seoul (Korea).
Our aim is to categorise when, how and to what extent language influences cognition: In which context does language-specific grammar shape categorization, mental representations, inferences and memory for events/states? Which are the cognitive processes immune to language and which are more malleable? Which aspects of grammar (semantics, syntax, or morphology) influence cognition more than others? When does a language’s influence start in the course of a child’s development?