Goldin-Meadow Susan, So Wing Chee, Ozyürek Asli, Mylander Carolyn
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5730 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2008 Jul 8;105(27):9163-8. doi: 10.1073/pnas.0710060105. Epub 2008 Jul 1.
To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an event with pictures). We found that the word orders speakers used in their everyday speech did not influence their nonverbal behavior. Surprisingly, speakers of all four languages used the same order and on both nonverbal tasks. This order, actor-patient-act, is analogous to the subject-object-verb pattern found in many languages of the world and, importantly, in newly developing gestural languages. The findings provide evidence for a natural order that we impose on events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when constructing language anew.
为了测试即使我们不说话时，我们所说的语言是否会影响我们的行为，我们让说四种主要语序不同的语言（英语、土耳其语、西班牙语和中文）的人执行两项非语言任务：一项交流任务（用手势描述一个事件而不说话）和一项非交流任务（用图片重构一个事件）。我们发现，说话者在日常言语中使用的语序并没有影响他们的非语言行为。令人惊讶的是，所有四种语言的使用者在两项非语言任务中都使用了相同的顺序。这种顺序，即施事-受事-动作，类似于世界上许多语言中发现的主语-宾语-动词模式，重要的是，在新发展的手势语言中也是如此。这些发现为一种自然顺序提供了证据，即当我们以非语言方式描述和重构事件时，我们会将这种顺序强加于事件之上，并且在重新构建语言时加以利用。
