Causality Across Languages

因果关系是认知的一个关键方面。我们的大脑通过将观察到的事件作为因果联系起来，从而为经验的流动带来秩序。这是解释过去和预测未来不可缺少的先决条件。长期以来，哲学家和认知科学家一直对我们赋予因果关系的能力的认知基础感到困惑。一个基本关注的问题是，因果认知的哪些方面在人群中是不变的，因此可能具有先天基础，哪些是后天习得的，并受到跨文化差异的影响。本项目旨在回答这个问题，主要使用语言作为因果认知的窗口。主要目的是第一次大规模比较不同语言的使用者如何对因果链进行分类以描述它们。该项目将有助于辨别说话者在表示因果链时从可用的表达选项中进行选择的标准。这些选项已经被证明在不同的语言中差异很大。此外，因果关系的编码是人类语言语法结构的一个关键方面，该项目将对“语法-语义接口”理论（语言中形式和意义之间的映射）做出重要的经验贡献。它还包括迄今为止最大规模的关于语言如何在因果关系的表征中与非语言认知交互的调查。一个由28名经验丰富的实地研究人员组成的国际小组将调查六大洲26个语系29种语言的因果关系。将创建一个描述事件序列的大型视频剪辑集，这些事件序列可能是因果关系，也可能不是因果关系。将收集每种语言至少12名讲者在各种受控条件下对这些片段的描述。研究人员将探究这些描述的意义和结构，并在此过程中测试跨语言预测。一个非语言分类实验将测试参与者在不谈论因果关系时如何概念化因果关系，目的是研究内在思维和因果关系的语言表征在多大程度上一致。

Causality is a key aspect of cognition. Our minds bring order to the flux of experience by relating observed events to one another as causes and effects. This is an indispensible prerequisite to explaining past events and predicting future one. Philosophers and cognitive scientists have long puzzled over the cognitive basis of our ability to attribute cause-effect relations. A question of fundamental concern is which aspects of causal cognition are invariant across human populations and thus may have an innate basis, and which are learned and subject to cross-cultural variation. This project aims to contribute to answering this question, using primarily language as a window into causal cognition. The principal objective is the first large-scale comparison of how speakers of different languages categorize causal chains for the purposes of describing them. The project will help discern the criteria by which speakers choose from among the expressive options available to them when representing causal chains. These options have been shown to vary enormously across languages. Furthermore, the encoding of causal relations is a key aspect of the grammatical structure of human language, and the project will make important empirical contributions to the theory of the "syntax-semantics interface", the mapping between form and meaning in language. It also includes the largest-scale investigation to date of how language interfaces with nonlinguistic cognition in the representation of causality.An international team of 28 experienced field researchers will investigate the representation of causality across 29 languages belonging to 26 language families and spoken on six continents. A large set of video clips depicting event sequences that may or may not be causally related will be created. Descriptions of these clips under various controlled conditions will be collected from at least 12 speakers per language. The researchers will probe the meaning and structure of the descriptions, testing crosslinguistic predictions in the process. A nonverbal categorization experiment will test how participants conceptualize causal relations when they do not talk about them, with the objective of studying to what degree internal thought and verbal representations of causality align.