Lera Boroditsky facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Lera Boroditsky
Left to right: Performance artist Xandra Ibarra, cultural anthropologist Adrian Van Allen, Boroditsky in 2017
Born	Belarus
Alma mater	Northwestern University (BA, 1996), Stanford University (PhD, 2001)
Scientific career
Doctoral advisor	Gordon H. Bower

Lera Boroditsky (born around 1976) is a cognitive scientist. This means she studies how our minds work, especially how we think and learn. She is a professor who focuses on how language and our thoughts are connected.

She is famous for her ideas about linguistic relativity. This is the idea that the language we speak might change how we see the world and how we think. She has won many important awards for her research. Today, she teaches at the University of California, San Diego. Before that, she taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Stanford University.

Early life and education

Lera Boroditsky was born in Belarus. Her family is Jewish. When she was 12 years old, her family moved to the United States. There, she learned English, which was her fourth language!

As a teenager, she started wondering how different languages could make people think differently. She also wondered if language could make arguments bigger between people. She went to Northwestern University and earned a degree in cognitive science in 1996. Later, she got her Ph.D. (a high-level degree) in cognitive psychology from Stanford University in 2001. Her main teacher at Stanford was Gordon H. Bower.

Career

After finishing her studies, Boroditsky became a professor at MIT. Later, in 2004, she joined the faculty at Stanford University. Her former teacher, Gordon Bower, said it was very rare for Stanford to hire their own students back. He noted her high intelligence and strong ability to analyze things deeply. At Stanford, she taught psychology, philosophy, and linguistics.

Now, Boroditsky is a professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). She studies how language, thinking, and how we see things all work together. Her research uses ideas from many fields. These include linguistics (the study of language), psychology (the study of the mind), neuroscience (the study of the brain), and anthropology (the study of human societies and cultures).

Her work has helped us understand a big question: Does the language we speak change the way we think? This idea is called linguistic relativity. She shows strong examples of how people who speak different languages think and see things differently. These differences come from how languages are built or the words they use. Her research has shown that language and culture do affect how we think. This goes against older ideas that human thinking is mostly the same for everyone, no matter their language.

She has received several important awards for her research. These include the NSF CAREER award and the Marr Prize. She also gives talks to the public about science. In these talks, she explains how languages are different. She shows how these differences might shape our thoughts.

Research

Lera Boroditsky is well-known for her research in cognitive science. She especially studies how language affects the way we think. One of her main research areas looks at how people from different language backgrounds act. She observes their behaviors when they experience certain events. She wants to know how the languages we speak influence our thoughts.

She has done studies comparing English speakers to speakers of other languages. She looks at how they think and act in different situations. For example, in English, we use "cup" and "glass" based on what they are made of. But in Russian, the difference between a cup and a glass depends on its shape.

Another example of her work looks at how English and Mandarin Chinese speakers think about time and space. In one of her articles, Boroditsky suggested a "weak version" of linguistic relativity. This means language can influence thought, but it doesn't completely control it. She found that English speakers often think of time like moving forward horizontally. Mandarin speakers, however, often think of time like moving up or down vertically.

She also said that these differences don't totally decide how we think. People can learn to think like speakers of other languages. They can do this even without learning that language. So, our native language might affect our thinking, but it doesn't completely determine it.

Boroditsky has also researched how metaphors relate to ideas like crime. Metaphors are when we describe one thing by saying it is another. For example, if crime is called a "beast," people might want to fight it with more police. But if crime is called a "virus," people might want to "treat" it with social changes. Her work shows that these common metaphors can change how people think about problems.

See also

In Spanish: Lera Boroditsky para niños