What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?

By Paul Kay, W. Kempton. 1983

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

Citations in the corpus

Assessing gender bias in machine translation: a case study with Google Translate (2018, background): “It has been argued that one’s language affects one’s knowledge and cognition about the world [21], and this leads to the discussion that languages that distinguish between female and male genders grammatically may enforce a bias in the person’s perception of the world, with some studies”
Culture and Cognition (2019, unknown): “This body of evidence against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been challenged in recent years (Davidoff, Davies, & Roberson, 1999; Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000; Roberson, Davidoff, Davies, & Shapiro, 2005; see also Lucy & Schweder, 1979; Kay & Kempton, 1984).”
Does language shape thought? Mandarin and English speakers' conceptions of time. (2001, background): “…view was work on color perception demonstrating that the Dani (a tribe in New Guinea) had little trouble learning the English set of color categories, despite having only two words for colors in their language (Heider, 1972; Rosch, 1975, 1978; but see Lucy & Shweder, 1979; Kay & Kempton, 1984).”
New Perspectives on Language and Thought (2012, background): “…advantage for differently labeled colors disappeared in the presence of a task that interferes with verbal processing but not in the presence of a task of comparable difficulty that does not disrupt verbal processing (see also Kay & Kempton, 1984; Winauer, Witthoft, Frank, Wu, & Boroditsky, 2007).”
Representation of colour concepts in bilingual cognition: The case of Japanese blues* (2010, background): “Colour perception has been a traditional test case of the Whorfian principle of linguistic relativity (Berlin & Kay, 1969; Brown & Lenneberg, 1954; Heider & Olivier, 1972; Kay & Kempton, 1984; Roberson, 2005; Rosch-Heider, 1972).”
Color categories are not universal: replications and new evidence from a stone-age culture. (2000, methodology): “man-out/matching-pairs triad task ( Kay & Kempton, 1984; Fukuzawa et al.,”
Boys Don’t Play with Dolls: Mothers’ and Fathers’ Gender Talk during Picture Book Reading (2014, methodology): “…of their unconscious and frequent use of indirect forms of gender talk (i.e., gender labeling, evaluative comments), which have important consequences for the way children conceptualize their worlds (i.e., Kay & Kempton, 1984; Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and how they behave in the future (Bem, 1983).”
Color Categories Are Culturally Diverse in Cognition as Well as in Language (2005, methodology): “…may not be independent of language is supported by findings that speakers of languages that do not make the same linguistic distinctions of perceptual continua but instead perceive a continuously graded change, also fail to show categorical perception (Kay & Kempton, 1984; Roberson et al., 2002).”
With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time (2006, background): “Further, an investigation that is more distant from linguistic usage may reveal the possibility of the same speakers accessing a different set of categories from those imposed by their language ( Kay & Kempton, 1984 ).”
CULTURE IN LANGUAGE LEARNING AND TEACHING (2005, background): “Furthermore, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis implies that there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who use another language (Chandler, 1994).”
1 Sex , Syntax , and Semantics (2000, unknown): “Particularly effective in undermining the strong view was work showing striking similarity in color memory despite wide variation in color language (Heider, 1972; but see Lucy & Shweder, 1979; Kay & Kempton, 1984).”
Speaking and remembering in one or two languages: bilingual vs. monolingual lexicalization and memory for motion events (2011, background): “…has motivated researchers to take a closer look at the relationship between language and conceptualization, especially in the domain of color (Kay & Kempton, 1984) and more recently spatial cognition (e.g., Bloom, Peterson, Nadel, & Garrett, 1999; Gentner & Goldin-Meadow, 2003; Levinson, 2003;…”