Sitting at a table in his first-floor office in the Department of Comparative Human Development, John Lucy, PhD’87, chuckles as he recalls arriving at the University of Chicago “a long time ago.” 

Lucy moved to Hyde Park in 1972 as a PhD student in the Committee on Human Development. A year later, he married Suzanne Gaskins, PhD’90, who began a doctoral program in the Department of Education soon thereafter.

Lucy’s dissertation was published in two volumes: Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis and Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (both Cambridge University Press, 1992). After earning his doctorate, he became a Harper Fellow in the College and then an assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1996, when Gaskins joined the psychology faculty at Northeastern Illinois University, Lucy accepted a faculty position in Chicago’s Department of Psychology.

Now the William Benton Professor in Comparative Human Development, Psychology, and the College, Lucy is also chair of the Department of Comparative Human Development. He spoke with Dialogo about his career path and his ongoing work with Gaskins in the Yucatán Peninsula.

For a comparative study of languages, such as your dissertation, you need to work with at least two languages. One of yours was English. How did you pick the other one?

I study the relation of language and thought. I’m interested in how different languages might lead to different ways of thinking or different modes of cognition. For example, a language’s counting system might lead its speakers to pay more or less attention to numbers within the experienced world. To pursue that line of research, I needed to work with a language that’s dramatically different from English or other European languages. And as a developmentalist who was interested in eventually studying children over the long term, I didn’t want to conduct ongoing work in a far-off part of the world. I set out to find a research area in North America with people speaking a language that met my particular requirements.

Suzanne does comparative child development—we have separate careers that have interacted in a common field site. During graduate school in the summer of ’74, the two of us did preliminary fieldwork to find a permanent research location. We traveled for two weeks down through Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. We narrowed our research area to the Maya region. The next summer, we went down again, visited the Yucatán Peninsula and decided to conduct our research there. After returning to Hyde Park, we learned Yucatec Maya here at Chicago. The course was taught by anthropology and linguistics professor Norman McQuown. 

Suzanne and I went back to the Yucatán in ’77. We stayed there for two years while I collected dissertation data. The project involved conducting psychological experiments with adult male subjects, both in America and in the Yucatán. I was looking at how English and Yucatec compare in terms of what one is required to include in a sentence.

Could you explain that to us?

For example, Yucatec speakers build their vocabulary up around reference to material, not to shape or function. Take the word they would use to refer to a wooden table. It would refer to the wood, not to the table shape. One must then indicate what kind of wood so the meaning is understood. In contrast, the word for “table” in English refers to the object’s shape and function. For us the table doesn’t have to be made of wood—it can be any flat thing. So if English speakers want to indicate the table’s material, we have to add that information in. 

Based on these differences, I hypothesized that Yucatec speakers would be more attentive to material commonalities among things than English speakers, while English speakers would be more attuned to shape commonalities. In the experiments, that’s exactly what happened.

What were the broader implications of your findings?

The main goal of the research was methodological, that is, to design a method for doing this sort of research. This work has provided a model that has since been emulated by other researchers exploring a range of language and thought connections. In terms of specific substantive findings, the research suggests that speakers of other languages with the same or similar structural type will show similar cognitive patterns. This has proven true, most notably in the case of Japanese. 

In terms of broader implications within the culture, the findings are in accord with the labeling of new objects, which are tagged by their materials; exploring new objects with a special attention to material composition; and emphases on materials in medical, religious, mythic, and other contexts.

Is there a competing way of thinking about language and cognition that your findings provide evidence against?

There are two other dominant views. One is that language and thought are pretty much unconnected. From this viewpoint, language diversity does not matter because we all see the world more or less the same regardless of our language. A second view is that the two are connected, but that the influence runs the other way: thought shapes language.

You mentioned earlier your plans to study children over the long term. Did you ever pursue this line of research?

Once I established these differences in task performance among adults, the next question was: when do they emerge? Suzanne and I have separate research interests—she studies childhood play and how it varies by culture—but we did collaborate on a major study to explore that question. I worked with Suzanne because I thought the differences would begin appearing at around three or four years, and she’s an expert on that age group. As it turned out, the children were making word choices based on the inferences of their language at four or five, but they weren’t guiding their general cognition by it. At some point language and thought connect so that language is used to guide one’s general thinking—we observed this change around eight years of age, plus or minus a year. When we studied seven-year-olds in America and the Yucatán, the two groups showed similar results. But when we studied nine-year-olds, the populations looked different.

What is the significance of language beginning to influence thought at around eight years?

As a developmentalist who focuses on cultural effects, I’m arguing that, yes, important traits that are universal and biological—for example, the cognitive abilities that we are all born with—are what get kids everywhere started. But that doesn’t mean that other important traits don’t emerge later, traits that are culturally and socially shaped. The seven-year-olds in our study tested alike, but they didn’t test alike a year or two later. It’s a kind of psychology that emphasizes the social impact as well as what’s sometimes called the mediational means—that is, the intellectual tools you use shape the thinking based on them.

You and Suzanne have been going to the Yucatán for more than 30 years. How has it changed?

When we went in ’77, we spent six weeks scouting things out. We found a village we liked; we built a house, that is, a one-room stick hut. We still have a couple of houses there. All in all, we’ve spent three full years and almost every summer in this village. We’ve been part of the community for a long time. We’ve seen children born, and some of the people we’ve known have died. When we first went, it was extremely isolated. It was a four-hour walk, at best, to the road, and 12 hours to our supply town. There was no electric power, no running water. Now, 30 years later, there’s a paved road; there’s electricity; water runs a few times a day. Once in a while, there’s Internet in the town hall. 

When Suzanne and I retire from teaching, we’ll probably dedicate a number of years to writing a monograph describing the social change we’ve observed.