Gary Lupyan is a professor of psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research attempts to answer questions such as what learning and using language does to our minds, how language came to be, and why languages have the structure they do.
Professor of Psychology at the Northwestern University. Research Interests: Learning and Thinking; Analogy, Similarity and Metaphor; Concepts and Conceptual Structure; Language and Cognition; Language Acquisition; Cross-linguistic Studies.
Does language reflect the categories of our mind or does it help create them? On one widespread view learning a language involves mapping words onto pre-existing categories, leaving little room for language to affect the conceptual landscape. Alternatively, many of our concepts — including some that seem very basic — may derive from our experience with and use of language. I will argue in favor of this second view and present evidence for the causal role of language in categorization and reasoning.
