Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science.
By Damián E. Blasi, Joseph Henrich, Evangelia Adamou, David Kemmerer, Asifa Majid. 2022
291 citations recorded by the source corpus.
English is the dominant language in the study of human cognition and behavior: the individuals studied by cognitive scientists, as well as most of the scientists themselves, are frequently English speakers. However, English differs from other languages in ways that have consequences for the whole of the cognitive sciences, reaching far beyond the study of language itself. Here, we review an emerging body of evidence that highlights how the particular characteristics of English and the linguistic habits of English speakers bias the field by both warping research programs (e.g., overemphasizing features and mechanisms present in English over others) and overgeneralizing observations from English speakers' behaviors, brains, and cognition to our entire species. We propose mitigating strategies that could help avoid some of these pitfalls.
Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science & Psychology, Social Sciences & Humanities
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In Cognitive Neuroscience
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Citations in the corpus
- Neural Theory-of-Mind? On the Limits of Social Intelligence in Large LMs (2022, background): “Echoing recent cognitive science work that argues the need for non-English cognitive science investigations (Blasi et al., 2022).”
- Construction and educational application of a linguistically grounded dependency treebank for Uyghur (2025, unknown): “Advanced tools capable of deep syntactic analysis are predominantly concentrated in high-resource languages, while low-resource languages face systematic inequalities in both model performance and application coverage (Weng and Chiu, 2023; Blasi et al., 2022a; Pakray et al., 2025).”