Fischer Martin H, Shaki Samuel, Cruise Alexander
School of Psychology, University of Dundee, Scotland, UK.
Exp Psychol. 2009;56(5):361-6. doi: 10.1027/1618-3169.56.5.361.
Our directional reading habit seems to contribute to the widely reported association of small numbers with left space and larger numbers with right space (the spatial-numerical association of response codes, SNARC, effect). But how can this association be so flexible when reading habits are not? To address this question, we asked bilingual Russian-Hebrew readers to classify numbers by parity and alternated the number format from trial to trial between written words and Arabic digits. The number words were randomly printed in either Cyrillic or Hebrew script, thus inducing left-to-right or right-to-left reading, respectively. Classification performance indicated that the digits were spatially mapped when they followed a Russian word but not when they followed a Hebrew word. An auditory control experiment revealed left-to-right SNARC effects with different strengths in both languages. These results suggest that the SNARC effect reflects recent spatial experiences, cross-modal associations, and long-standing directional habits but not an attribute of the number concepts themselves.
我们的方向性阅读习惯似乎促成了大量被报道的小数与左空间、大数与右空间的关联（反应编码的空间数字关联，即SNARC效应）。但是，当阅读习惯并非如此灵活时，这种关联怎么会如此灵活呢？为了解决这个问题，我们让俄语-希伯来语双语读者按奇偶性对数字进行分类，并在每次试验之间交替数字格式，在书面单词和阿拉伯数字之间切换。数字单词随机用西里尔文或希伯来文书写，从而分别产生从左到右或从右到左的阅读顺序。分类表现表明，当数字跟随俄语单词时会在空间上进行映射，而跟随希伯来语单词时则不会。一项听觉对照实验揭示了两种语言中强度不同的从左到右的SNARC效应。这些结果表明，SNARC效应反映了最近的空间体验、跨模态关联和长期的方向性习惯，而不是数字概念本身的一个属性。
