Overview Semantics and cognition Cliff Goddard 1* and Anna Wierzbicka 2 The words and grammar of any language encode a vast array of complex prepackaged concepts, most of them language-specific and culture-related. These concepts are manipulated routinely in almost every waking hour of most people’s lives. They are largely acquired in infancy and they are intersubjectively shared among members of the speech community. It is hard to imagine such elaborate and variable representation systems not having a substantial role to play in ordinary cognition, and yet the language-and-thought question continues to be a contested one across the various disciplines and sub-disciplines of cognitive science. This article provides an overview from the vantage point of linguistic semantics.  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. WIREs Cogn Sci 2 0 1 1 2 125–135 DOI: 10.1002/wcs.101 INTRODUCTION M any aspects of human cognition, such as basic perception, attention, and visual processing, are substantially shared with other primates. Language is primarily relevant to higher order cognitive processes that are largely, if not entirely, species-unique. Importantly, human cognition not only includes reasoning and information processing about physical reality but also includes the so-called social cognition, i.e., assessing and reasoning about intentions, mental states, and social situations, 1 and it is in this arena that language has some of its clearest cognitive effects. Although higher order thinking need not be conducted exclusively in terms of linguistic concepts, there can be no doubt that language plays a substantial role in normal cognition (including categorization, planning, problem solving, and memory). Some scholars maintain that language is partially constitutive of higher order cognition and epistemologically essential to any inquiry into it. 2 The crucial fact is that there is tremendous variation across the world’s languages in the seman- tic (meaning) content of words and grammatical categories. 3–13 The basic arguments for the involvement of language-specific semantics in cognitive processes are simple and compelling. In order to speak using the lexical categories and observing the grammatical * Correspondence to: cgoddard@une.edu.au 1 School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia 2 School of Language Studies Australian National University, Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia DOI: 10.1002/wcs.101 distinctions of any language, speakers must attend to and manipulate a large number of language-specific conceptual distinctions. Thus, at the very least, there must be a mode of cognitive processing, which Dan Slobin 14 dubbed ‘thinking for speaking’, which dove- tails with linguistic concepts. Viewed from another angle, any language can be thought of as a ‘tool for thinking’, inasmuch as its lexical and grammatical categories provide speakers with a vast array of ready-made concepts. The packaging of complex concepts into words enables complex manipulations to be undertaken, which would be impossible without conceptual ‘chunking’. From the developmental per- spective, evidence indicates that language acquisition does not merely reflect conceptual development, but contributes to it in complex ways. As a shared system of cultural representations, language is one of the main instruments by which children are socialized into the values, beliefs, and practices—including thinking practices—of their culture. Although the relationship between language and thinking is a perennial topic (under the rubric of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and/or linguistic relativity), the question is often approached in a rather abstract fashion. At the worst, there is a thinly veiled assump- tion that all languages are ‘broadly similar’, i.e., not much different to English, so far as categories and con- ceptual content is concerned, a belief which has been partly nurtured by acceptance of the formal universals of generative grammar and partly by the fact that most cognitive scientists in the Anglophone world are monolingual. The primary emphasis of this article is therefore on the nature, scope, and cognitive import of language-specific differences in lexicon and grammar. Volume 2, March/April 2011  2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. 125