Book reviews : Perspectives on language and thought: interrelations in development S. A. Gelman and J. P. Byrnes, editors Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xii + 524pp
Abstract
88 Book reviewsPerspectives on language and thought: interrelations in development S. A. Gelman and J. P. Byrnes, editors Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xii + 524pp SAGE Publications, Inc.1993DOI: 10.1177/026565909300900113 Alan Garnham Laboratory of Experimental Psychology, University of Sussex, Brighton BNI 9QG, UK Psychological research on the relation between language and thought was long dominated by broad questions that were fascinating, but probably unanswerable. Whorf's twin hypotheses of linguistic deter- minism and linguistic relativity caught the psychological imagination in the 1950s, only to be unceremoniously rejected 20 years later following Eleanor Rosch's studies of colour naming and memory. However, colour is an unlikely domain for language to influence thought, because colour perception is closely tied to physiology, at least much more so than is the case for abstract concepts. On closer examination, Whorf's position is both vague and apparently contradictory. Similarly, Vygotsky's psychologically more sophisticated ideas are notoriously difficult to make precise. However, Vygotsky, unlike Whorf, was fascinated by how the relation between language and thought develops through childhood. Developmental questions are the focus of Perspectives on language and thought, but they are no longer the broad ones that exercised Whorf and Vygotsky. Recent research has turned to