"Why Do Some Phenomena Elude Language and Consciousness?"
Dr. Asifa Majid, University of Oxford, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University
Monday, April 10th at 5:30 p.m., Psychology Room 118
About Dr. Majid
Asifa Majid is a professor of cognitive science at the University of Oxford. Majid studies the relationship among language, culture, and mind.
Humans are one species, and yet we speak 7,000 different, mutually unintelligible languages, each hosted in distinct cultural niches around the globe.
How does this diversity of language, culture, and experience affect how people think and behave? During her fellowship year,
Majid is writing a book to synthesize her wide-ranging empirical work to elucidate which aspects of cognition are fundamentally shared and which are language- or culture-specific.
Majid, who earned her PhD at the University of Glasgow, in Scotland, has published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and has been awarded various prizes for her scientific work
(e.g., Ammodo Science Award, Radboud Science Award) and public engagement (e.g., Science Live @Drongo award).
She received a personal grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) of €1.5 million to study language and cognition across cultures.
Majid is an elected member of Academia Europaea for her contributions to linguistics, an elected fellow of the Association for
Psychological Science in recognition of her sustained outstanding contributions to psychology, and an elected fellow of the Cognitive Science Society for sustained research excellence and impact.
Abstract
Why are some things relatively easy to express in language (e.g., geometric shapes) but others hard (e.g., odors)? Different proposals abound. Perhaps differential expressibility reveals something about the cognitive architecture of our mind~brains. The difficulty of naming odors, for example, has been attributed to the way olfactory and language areas of the brain are connected. On the other hand, there may be something specific about the properties of language itself that make some sensations easier or harder to express: that is, universal design features of semantics and syntax may restrict expressibility of particular percepts. Alternatively, there may be asymmetries in our ability to represent sensory information in the first place—studies show people generally report vivid visual imagery, for example, but only weak smell and taste imagery. Based on fieldwork and laboratory studies, I will show differential expressibility in language reflects cultural, not just cognitive or linguistic biases. Things that elude description in English are nevertheless easily conveyed in other languages, highlighting the role culture and experience play in understanding the nature and limits of language. This raises new questions about how culture and language may, in turn, shape our cognitive abilities.
Suggested Readings
Majid, et al. (2018). Differential coding of perception in the world’s languages, PNAS, 115(45), 11369-11376. [.pdf]
Majid, (2021). Human olfaction at the intersection of language, culture, and biology, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(2), 111-123. [.pdf]
Blasi, et al. (2022). Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 26(12), 1153-1170. [.pdf]
