Professor Lera Boroditsky

Lera Boroditsky, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Stanford University. She studies language and cognition, specifically focusing on interactions between language, cognition, and perception.
 
Lera’s research combines insights and methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology. She has received several awards for her research, including an NSF CAREER award, the Marr Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and being named a Searle Scholar. Her first faculty position was at MIT in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at age 23.
 
Her work has provided new insights on the controversial question of whether the languages we speak shape the way we think (see Sapir—Whorf hypothesis). She has discovered important empirical examples of cross-linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences between languages. This work has been influential in the fields of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics in countering the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of language and culture.
 
Lera authored Metaphoric structuring: understanding time through spatial metaphors and Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time, and coauthored Individuation, relativity, and early word learning, The Roles of Body and Mind in Abstract Thought, As time goes by: Evidence for two systems in processing space→time metaphors, Sex, Syntax, and Semantics, On the Experiential Link Between Spatial and Temporal Language, and How deep are effects of language on thought? Time estimation in speakers of English, Indonesian, Greek, and Spanish.
 
Lera earned her BA (with honors) in Cognitive Science from Northwestern University in 1996 and her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University in 2001.
 
Watch Lera Boroditsky on at CogSci 2008 – Part 1 and Part 2. Read Knowledge About How We Know Will Change Everything, Do our languages shape the nuts and bolts of perception, the very way we see the world?, She explores the world of language and thought, and When Language Can Hold the Answer.