ESRC Bilingualism Centre, Bangor, UK.
Brain Res. 2012 Oct 15;1479:72-9. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2012.08.044. Epub 2012 Aug 31.
Does language modulate perception and categorisation of everyday objects? Here, we approach this question from the perspective of grammatical gender in bilinguals. We tested Spanish-English bilinguals and control native speakers of English in a semantic categorisation task on triplets of pictures in an all-in-English context while measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants were asked to press a button when the third picture of a triplet belonged to the same semantic category as the first two, and another button when it belonged to a different category. Unbeknownst to them, in half of the trials, the gender of the third picture name in Spanish had the same gender as that of the first two, and the opposite gender in the other half. We found no priming in behavioural results of either semantic relatedness or gender consistency. In contrast, ERPs revealed not only the expected semantic priming effect in both groups, but also a negative modulation by gender inconsistency in Spanish-English bilinguals, exclusively. These results provide evidence for spontaneous and unconscious access to grammatical gender in participants functioning in a context requiring no access to such information, thereby providing support for linguistic relativity effects in the grammatical domain.
语言是否会调节对日常物体的感知和分类？在这里，我们从双语者的语法性别角度来探讨这个问题。我们在一个全英文的语境中，对西班牙语-英语双语者和英语母语控制组进行了语义分类任务测试，该任务涉及三幅图片的配对，同时记录事件相关脑电位 (ERP)。当三幅图片中的第三幅与前两幅属于同一语义类别时，参与者被要求按下一个按钮；当属于不同类别时，按下另一个按钮。他们并不知道，在一半的试验中，西班牙语第三张图片的名称的性别与前两张的性别相同，而在另一半试验中，性别则相反。我们没有发现无论是语义相关性还是性别一致性的行为结果有启动效应。相比之下，ERP 不仅揭示了两组参与者预期的语义启动效应，还揭示了西班牙语-英语双语者在性别不一致时的负性调节作用，这种作用是独特的。这些结果为参与者在不需要使用此类信息的语境中自动无意识地获取语法性别提供了证据，从而为语法领域的语言相对论效应提供了支持。
