Introduction

What is the relation between the way we talk and the way we think about the world? More specifically, does the language we speak influence the way we think, or does universal cognition guide the way we talk about the world? Or, perhaps, language and cognition are two independent entities, and thus do not affect each other. These are classic questions that have preoccupied the minds of psychologists and linguists for quite some time. Until the early 1990s, the predominant view – influenced by Chomsky's universal grammar (1965) – was that human languages share a significant number of universal properties and that these properties are shaped by universal cognition. In the last few years, however, with evidence of extensive and significant differences across languages particularly in the semantic domain of space, the debate on language and cognition has been re-kindled and has become, once again, a central issue in psychology, linguistics and cognitive science. In this debate, the Korean spatial semantic system, being very different from much-researched languages like English, has become an intriguing testing ground for evaluating differing theories.

In this chapter, I present an overview of the contrasting theories that have been presented so far on the relation between language and cognition. Then, I review some of the recent crosslinguistic studies that have been conducted, including my own, in the domain of space comparing learners/speakers of English and Korean.