While it seems entirely reasonable that the underlying principles of symbolic systems such as mathematics or music would be understood by both humans and an alien intelligence, the way in which a particular being acquires and processes sensory data will influence its construction of any system to describe what is being processed. Furthermore, the elements of the world that are deemed important in a particular culture, which are, in turn, shaped by the sensory organs available to a particular species of beings, will also influence cognition and the manner in which individuals in that society classify and construct their world around elements that matter more or less.

Whether it is counting, music, or mathematics, the question of how to communicate is not simply one of the mediums through which ideas are exchanged or the capacity to carry out certain functions necessary to understanding and manipulating an environment that is consistent in the universe that both beings inhabit. Instead, it is one of recognizing an interpretive context or framework for communication that will work when it is quite possible that the mode of communication and interpretation—of receiving and analyzing information—natural to an extraterrestrial life-form will differ significantly from our own. At the root of this issue is the question of how culture factors into that process of interstellar communication and the construction of interstellar messages.

Recent research focusing on how humans might construct interstellar messages to communicate with an extraterrestrial intelligence has raised interesting opportunities to think about the manner in which contact and culture intersect. Douglas Vakoch, for example, asks the important question of whether music, the seemingly universal “language” shared by humans, could provide a means of communicating or whether it might be incomprehensible to beings with different types of sense organs and who evolved different ways of dealing with the exchange of information through sound. It has also been widely thought that mathematics would provide an excellent means of communication.

The intersection of language and cognition is both a traditional and an emergent area of inquiry in linguistic anthropology. New insights from linguistic anthropology and cognitive psychology have made it possible to reformulate the problem of the effects of language on category formation (language and thought). Bennardo has worked on the history of linguistic relativity, conducted research by collecting empirical ethnographic data, and written on innovative ways in which relativity can be approached. Cognitive Studies Initiative at NIU.

Language is often considered crucial to what makes us human: as a capacity that is in part biologically-based, language is a medium for thought, a vehicle for cultural transmission, and a means of social action. Language is at the nexus of biology, history, culture, cognition, and social life. Linguistic anthropologists, then, study the ways in which people negotiate, contest, and reproduce cultural forms and social relations through language, and the ways in which language provides insights into the nature and evolution of culture, cognition, and human society.