Papafragou Anna, Massey Christine, Gleitman Lila
Department of Psychology, University of Delaware, 109 Wolf Hall, Newark DE 19716, USA.
Cognition. 2006 Jan;98(3):B75-87. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2005.05.005. Epub 2005 Jul 25.
How do we talk about events we perceive? And how tight is the connection between linguistic and non-linguistic representations of events? To address these questions, we experimentally compared motion descriptions produced by children and adults in two typologically distinct languages, Greek and English. Our findings confirm a well-known asymmetry between the two languages, such that English speakers are overall more likely to include manner of motion information than Greek speakers. However, mention of manner of motion in Greek speakers' descriptions increases significantly when manner is not inferable; by contrast, inferability of manner has no measurable effect on motion descriptions in English, where manner is already preferentially encoded. These results show that speakers actively monitor aspects of event structure, which do not find their way into linguistic descriptions. We conclude that, in regard to the differential encoding of path and manner, which has sometimes been offered as a prime example of the effects of language encoding on non-linguistic thought, surface linguistic encoding neither faithfully represents nor strongly constrains our mental representation of events.
我们如何谈论自己感知到的事件？事件的语言表征和非语言表征之间的联系有多紧密？为了解决这些问题，我们通过实验比较了儿童和成人在两种类型上截然不同的语言——希腊语和英语中对动作的描述。我们的研究结果证实了这两种语言之间一个众所周知的不对称现象，即说英语的人总体上比说希腊语的人更有可能包含动作方式信息。然而，当动作方式不可推断时，说希腊语的人在描述中提及动作方式的情况会显著增加；相比之下，动作方式的可推断性对英语中的动作描述没有可测量的影响，在英语中动作方式已经被优先编码。这些结果表明，说话者会积极监测事件结构的各个方面，而这些方面并没有进入语言描述中。我们得出结论，关于路径和方式的差异编码，有时它被作为语言编码对非语言思维影响的一个主要例子，表面的语言编码既不能忠实地表征我们对事件的心理表征，也不能对其产生强烈的限制。
