PhD project: does language determine how we perceive?

In the coming four years I will investigate the interaction between language and perception. The influence of language on perception has mainly been studied in the anthropological and psycholinguistics field. The results are however controversial and often limited to color perception.

Therefore, we want to examine whether the influence of language on perception extends to, for instance, motion perception. Furthermore, to investigate the relation between language and perception properly, we do not only want to collect behavioral data, but also fMRI, MEG and TMS data to be able to explain the interaction between language and perception on the level of the brain.

Lera Boroditsky has written a nice introductory article on the history of this ‘linguistic relativity’ research field.