Vigliocco Gabriella, Vinson David P, Woolfe Tyron, Dye Matthew W G, Woll Bencie
Department of Psychology, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1H 0AP, UK.
Proc Biol Sci. 2005 Sep 7;272(1574):1859-63. doi: 10.1098/rspb.2005.3169.
Across spoken languages, properties of wordforms (e.g. the sounds in the word hammer) do not generally evoke mental images associated to meanings. However, across signed languages, many signforms readily evoke mental images (e.g. the sign HAMMER resembles the motion involved in hammering). Here we assess the relationship between language and imagery, comparing the performance of English speakers and British sign language (BSL) signers in meaning similarity judgement tasks. In experiment 1, we found that BSL signers used these imagistic properties in making meaning similarity judgements, in contrast with English speakers. In experiment 2, we found that English speakers behaved more like BSL signers when asked to develop mental images for the words before performing the same task. These findings show that language differences can bias users to attend more to those aspects of the world encoded in their language than to those that are not; and that language modality (spoken versus signed) can affect the degree to which imagery is involved in language.
在不同的口语语言中，词形的属性（例如“hammer”这个词中的发音）通常不会唤起与意义相关的心理意象。然而，在不同的手语中，许多手语形式很容易唤起心理意象（例如，“HAMMER”这个手语类似于锤击的动作）。在这里，我们评估语言与意象之间的关系，比较以英语为母语的人和使用英国手语（BSL）的手语者在意义相似性判断任务中的表现。在实验1中，我们发现，与以英语为母语的人相比，使用英国手语的手语者在进行意义相似性判断时会利用这些意象属性。在实验2中，我们发现，当要求以英语为母语的人在执行相同任务之前为单词构建心理意象时，他们的表现更像使用英国手语的手语者。这些发现表明，语言差异会使使用者更关注其语言中编码的世界的那些方面，而不是那些未编码的方面；并且语言形式（口语与手语）会影响意象参与语言的程度。
