You and Betty and the Nancy's and Bill's and Joes and Jane's will find in the study of science

a richer, more rewarding life.

Hey, welcome to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas. This is a podcast that explores the space

where science and society collide. We want to find out what's true, what's left to discover, and why it matters.

One of the things I've been thinking about lately is how language shapes how we think. So I didn't speak English until I was seven,

and you probably can still hear the Canadian accent in me. But I also speak Lithuanian and French,

and there are many ways in which those two languages affect how I think about the world. But this

whole idea of if you don't have a word for it,

you can't actually imagine it. Linguistic relativity has kind of fallen out of favor, as there

have been a lot of research to show that maybe it's not quite as robust as we thought it was.

We also just put our son into a French immersion school, and it's been really interesting to

watch how that has affected the way that he thinks and various other aspects of his life. So I wanted

to talk to someone who could give us the cutting edge of research in this area, and I had long

been following the work of Lira Boroditsky. She's an associate professor of cognitive science

at UCSD in San Diego, but she also didn't

speak English until she was, well, probably somewhere around 12, according to her Wikipedia

page.

At that point, English was her fourth language.

And so throughout the course of her scientific career, she has asked this question of,

to what extent does the language that we speak

shape the way that we think?

Lyra Borditsky, welcome to inquiring minds.

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