Our colleague from English Linguistics, and regular participant at the CogSeminar, Prof. Panos Athanasopoulos, will present some of his recent research on the topic of linguistic relativity, research that like cognitive semiotics aspires for ecological validity. All are welcome to the usual place and zoom link from 15:00 for the usual "warm up", before starting the talk at 15:15. After 17:00 we will head for Valvet for more discussions and some drinks. Please let Jordan now if you are coming by October 28.

In simple terms, the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (LRH, Whorf, 1956) holds that language affects our thought and behaviour, in predictable ways. As a result, speakers of different languages think and perceive the world differently. Since the late 1990s, the prevalent empirical paradigm in LRH investigations has adopted the laboratory methods of cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics, placing controlled behaviour in the lab at the centre of its evidentiary basis (e.g., Lucy, 1997; Lupyan et al., 2020). While this has opened up Whorf’s ideas to fruitful empirical enquiry beyond the confines of linguistics and philosophy, it has also inadvertently shifted the epistemological focus from naturally occurring behaviour (i.e. ‘in the wild’) that Whorf was arguably primarily interested in, to – almost exclusively – behaviour generated by artificial laboratory tasks with little ecological validity. The current paper develops the argument in Athanasopoulos & Bylund (2020) that the time is ripe to strike a balance in our understanding of ‘what counts’ as an effect of language on thought, by presenting a case study that combines controlled data elicitation in an ecologically valid context, examining effects of grammatical gender on legal decision-making.