Words and worlds: Spatial language and thought among the Tseltal Maya

Recent years have seen a resurgence of work on the linguistic relativity hypothesis---the notion that the language we speak can profoundly influence the concepts we form. One of the most promising yet controversial areas of current investigation is the coordinate systems speakers use to reference locations and directions. A large body of cross-linguistic work has demonstrated a correlation between linguistic and nonlinguistic preferences for encoding spatial information at the community level. At the forefront of this discussion is a Tseltal Mayan community in Chiapas, Mexico. In contrast to English-speakers who primarily use a viewer-based system (left/right), Tseltal-speakers use geocentric cues, most notably the uphill/downhill slope of their land. Using linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks, I challenge strong relativistic claims that there is a linguistic and therefore conceptual "gap" among this population for representing spatial relationships in terms of egocentric, particularly left/right coordinates. Instead, I argue for a more moderate role of language in helping speakers manipulate non-salient or difficult to encode relationships.;In Section I, I operationalize linguistic frames of reference and present an overview of the resources for expressing spatial relationships in Tseltal. In Section II, I examine spatial language use among adult Tseltal speakers, their flexibility for extending existing resources into a left/right reference system, and language change among Tseltal-speaking children who are beginning to acquire a left/right reference system in Spanish at school. My results both extend and challenge previous work with this population by demonstrating micro-variations in the geocentric systems used, greater use of a deictic/egocentric perspective, and flexibility for using a left/right reference system.;In Section III, I compare the ability of Tseltal- and English-speaking children and adults to use both egocentric and geocentric systems. My results show that children and adults in both language groups show equal or better facility with using an egocentric compared with a geocentric perspective. However, in a further study, Tseltal-speaking adults had difficulty using non-egocentric viewer-based coordinates. Correlations between individual-level factors and language use as well as task performance suggest that education may facilitate the flexible application and extension of existing linguistic and cognitive resources to new conceptual domains.