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I was reading about linguistic relativity and it struck me that there could also be differences in multilingual individuals and mono/bi-lingual individuals on how they derive/reason/create structure out of the environment (causality models).

My personal experience has been that knowing/learning languages with different sentence structures (Tamil/Hindi vs English) has changed how I reason and form models. For example, I think I reason more probabilistically than simple "if this, then that".

I am conflating many factors of language difference together here:

  1. Auditory objects and effect of exposure to a variety of them.
  2. Sentence structure or grammatical rules for structure in the language.
  3. Differences in holding different sentence structures and/or grammar in the mind when communicating.

Anyway, my question can be split as :

  1. Are there standard/widely accepted experiments have been done to test methods used by individuals to infer cause and effect? Couple of examples for what i have in mind is here and here.

  2. Is there consensus on correlation between these experiments and indication of causal models used?

  3. If so, have there been studies of those experiments across monolingual individuals,and multilingual individuals?

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@JoshGitlin: I did a quick search on google scholar, and realized there's a lot more i have to read just to get this question more clear. Will do that once i get some free time. In fact i don't think i saw any established experimental paradigm for causal models used by people. – Anand Jeyahar Dec 5 '12 at 2:21
My initial search and skim suggests that the answers are no to all three questions, but i shall wait. – Anand Jeyahar Dec 10 '12 at 17:45

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