Education
She received her Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University and her Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University, where her thesis advisor was Gordon Bower.
She received her Bachelor of Arts from Northwestern University and her Doctor of Philosophy from Stanford University, where her thesis advisor was Gordon Bower.
She studies language and cognition, focusing on interactions between language, cognition, and perception. Her research combines insights and methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. Her work provides new insights on the controversial question of whether the languages we speak shape the way we think (Linguistic relativity), and examples of cross-linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences between languages.
Her papers and lectures have influenced the fields of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, in countering the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of language and culture.
In addition to scholarly work, Boroditsky also gives popular science lectures to the general public, and her work has been covered in news and media outlets. In her article “ Mandarin and English speakers" conceptions of time” (2001), Boroditsky has argued for a weak version of linguistic relativity, providing a ground for it through her cross-language studies on verb tenses carried out with English and Mandarin speakers.
She argues that English speaker conceive time in a way that is analogous to their conception of a spatial horizontal movement, whereas native Mandarin speakers associate it to a vertical movement. She has also stated that these differences do not totally determine conceptualization, since it is possible for the speakers of a language to be taught to think like the other language speaker do, needless to learn this other language.
Therefore, and according to Boroditsky, mother tongues may have an effect on cognition, but it is not determining.
Boroditsky"s results have failed to replicate with other authors.