Lera Boroditsky is a professor of cognitive science at University of California San Diego, and she has been studying the question of whether and how the languages we speak influence the way we think. In fact she’s done experiments to explore questions like, Do people who speak languages with gendered nouns think of things like bridges or paper clips or the moon as particularly masculine or feminine? What does it mean that some think of time as moving on a line and others not? How are Americans different from people who have formal and informal greetings? The metaphors and spatial concepts in our language go deeper than we might think.
