Language and Thought
Does Thought Come Before Language, or Language Before Thought?
One of the oldest debates in psychology concerns the relationship between the words we use and the way we think. Does our ability to think come first, with language following as a way to express our thoughts? Or does the language we speak shape how and what we can think? Two major theoretical positions give opposite answers to this question.
Piaget’s View: Language Depends on Thought
Jean Piaget, whose stage theory you may also study in Development, argued that cognitive development — the development of thinking and reasoning — comes before language. According to Piaget, children must first develop a mental concept before they can acquire the word for it.
For example, a child develops the concept of ‘permanence’ — the understanding that objects continue to exist when out of sight — during the sensorimotor stage. Only after this mental concept is formed can the child then attach the words “it’s still there” to their experience. Language, in Piaget’s view, is a tool for expressing thoughts that already exist, not the origin of those thoughts.
This means language is dependent on underlying cognitive development. A child cannot use language to think about something they do not yet conceptually understand. Thought is the foundation; language is built on top of it.
Piaget argued that language depends on thought: children must develop a cognitive concept first, and language follows as a way to express it. Cognitive development leads; language development follows.
The Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis: Thinking Depends on Language
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (also called the linguistic relativity hypothesis) takes the opposite view. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf proposed that the language a person speaks shapes the way they perceive and think about the world. Your vocabulary, grammar and the categories your language provides determine what you can easily think about and how you interpret your experiences.
The strong version of the hypothesis is called linguistic determinism: language completely determines thought, meaning people who speak different languages literally cannot think the same thoughts. The weak version (linguistic relativity) is more widely accepted: language influences and shapes thought, making certain ideas easier or harder to think about, but does not make it impossible to think beyond your language’s categories.
Research has explored how language affects the recall of events and the recognition of colours. Because different languages have different categories and labels, speakers of different languages may describe and remember the same event in different ways. For example, English uses a single past tense “he broke the vase,” while some other languages require speakers to indicate whether the action was accidental or deliberate. This linguistic difference may affect how speakers of each language remember and assign blame for an event.
Colour recognition provides another well-studied example. Different languages divide the colour spectrum into different categories. Some languages have a single word covering what English calls ‘blue’ and ‘green.’ Research has suggested that speakers of languages with more distinct colour terms can more easily distinguish shades in the relevant region of the spectrum, though the findings are debated.
The spec draws on evidence from Native American cultures to illustrate linguistic relativity. Whorf claimed that the Hopi language lacked tense, leading him to argue that Hopi speakers conceptualised time differently from English speakers. However, subsequent linguistic research — particularly Malotki (1983) — found that Hopi does in fact have tense and extensive time vocabulary, casting serious doubt on this specific claim. The Hopi-time claim is now widely considered an error in Whorf’s analysis rather than merely “challenged.” The general weak version of linguistic relativity (that language influences but does not determine thought) continues to attract empirical support from other areas such as colour naming and spatial reasoning. For example, languages that use absolute directions (north/south/east/west) rather than relative ones (left/right) are associated with differences in spatial reasoning among their speakers.
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis states that thinking depends on language: the words and categories available in your language shape what you can easily think and perceive. Evidence includes cross-cultural differences in colour recognition and event recall.
Evaluating Piaget and the Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis
Piaget’s view is supported by studies showing that young children develop certain concepts — such as conservation and object permanence — before they have the language to describe them. This suggests thought can exist independently of language in early development.
A weakness of Piaget’s position is that it does not explain how language itself might later feed back into and refine thinking. As children get older, learning a new word often introduces a new concept — suggesting language and thought influence each other rather than language being purely dependent.
The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in its strong form (linguistic determinism) is widely rejected because it implies people cannot think thoughts for which they have no words, but we know this happens — people regularly coin new words to describe concepts they already hold. The weaker form (linguistic relativity) has more empirical support from cross-cultural studies, particularly on colour naming and spatial reasoning, though the magnitude of the effect is debated.
Most modern psychologists take a middle position: language and thought are interactive — they influence each other rather than one simply determining the other.