Mapping of the Mind: A Questionnaire-Based Study of Mental Spaces and Identity Construction in Multilingual Speakers

Abstract

It goes without saying that any language undergoes myriad alterations through its existence. Due to an array of historical, socio-cultural and lexical shifts, languages are caught in a crossfire of constant modifications, simplification and conformity.

Any culture is a meticulous accumulation of innumerable, fundamental implications for human thought and demeanour. Therefore, any behavioural deviation or, vice versa, striking conformity to certain abutments, is in other words, the testimony of culturally acquired role-models, beliefs, values, etc. On the contrary, it must be noted that possible incongruities or similarities may either occur cross-culturally or can take place within the same culture.

Subsequently, the dilemma of the cross-cultural variables and their effect on people’s demeanour, cognition and interpretation was always a rife topic. However, it is infeasible to neglect the extent of the role that culture plays in human development, one cannot exclude the swiftness or altering distinctions, conformities and obsolete patterns in any culture, which in the long run brings one to the brink of interculturality. Taking contemporary cultural cognition into consideration, it is possible to state that the distinctions between cultures are simultaneously weak and strong.[1] The weakness of cross-cultural relationships and cognition concedes that the contents of cognition are frequently variable across different cultures, nevertheless, the processes that underlie these variations are themselves cross-culturally static.

For instance, although language varies in its surface peculiarities in numerous cultures, this variety is underpinned by universal psychological mechanisms that generate further cultural cognition (Chomsky, 1975; Pinker, 1994).[2]

In juxtaposition to the weak version of cultural cognition, its adversary, i.e., the strong version, argues that not only the contents of cognition vary across cultures, but so does the core nature of cognitive processes. Within the cross-cultural vista of cognition, culture can be depicted as the drastic changer of the basic cognition. Merlin Donald (1991) suggests, "Cultures restructure the human mind, not only in terms of its specific contents, which are obviously culture bound, but also in terms of its fundamental neurological organization." [3]

Consequently, cultural cognition and the following response are highly variable and are intrinsically dependant not only on subjectivity, but also on the omnipresent, societally overwhelming cultural norms that serve as a benchmark of sensitivity and regularities. The latter leads to an acknowledgment that any cognitive process implies cultural and academic backgrounds, as well as (cross) cultural demeanour model, which in its turn encompasses the array of subjectivity and objectivity, and the expansion of thought in accordance with intellectual integrity and wavering patterns. It means that any cognitive process is a fragile vessel, which may simultaneously ooze patterns, thus changing the initial image, or on the other hand, may blend new paradigms, thus establishing cognitive compatibility with previously accepted norms.

Due to its topicality, it is a meticulous work to delineate the paramount importance of cultural and cross-cultural cognition in the moulding of social constraints and possible variables and their correlation. In addition, it poses the issue of the possibility of establishing a universal approach or schema of branches of cultural cognition and their possible deviations or alterations in accordance with the previous, present and potential knowledge and the expansion of thought.