Sinha: Culture in language and cognition

Continuing this post, Sinha (2021) further differentiates cognitive linguistics' roots, which lean more toward Vygotsky than Piaget.

"Piaget was a universalist: he claimed that all children progressed through the same developmental stages, only the rate of development being influenced by social and cultural factors. For Vygotsky, by contrast, 'higher psychological functions' (including memory and reasoning) are shaped by the cultural forms that they take in any given society, and are semiotically mediated— that is, it is the acquisition and use of linguistic and other signs that enables the development of the psychological function" (390).

 

Also of interest in the Dawn of Everything debate is that, since Vygotsky claimed that "human cognition is embodied not only in the brain, but also in the products of material and symbolic culture," then Cole and his colleagues noted:

 

"Beyond the idea of a uniform distinction between more and less ‘advanced’ societies, and between ‘logical’ and ‘non- logical’ thinking, they focused instead on the ways in which transcultural cognitive resources are brought to bear on different problem areas, in different contexts of reasoning and communication. Their 'major conclusion' was that 'cultural differences in cognition reside more in the situations to which particular cognitive processes are applied than in the existence of a process in one cultural group and its absence in another” (390).

 

Sinha, C. (2021). "Culture in language and cognition." The Routledge Handbook of Cognitive Linguistics. New York: Routledge, pp. 387 - 408