ESRC Bilingualism Centre, Bangor University Bangor, UK ; School of Psychology, Bangor University Bangor, UK.
Department of Psychology, Penn State University PA, USA.
Front Psychol. 2014 Mar 14;5:222. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00222. eCollection 2014.
Linguistic relativity theory has received empirical support in domains such as color perception and object categorization. It is unknown, however, whether relations between words idiosyncratic to language impact non-verbal representations and conceptualizations. For instance, would one consider the concepts of horse and sea as related were it not for the existence of the compound seahorse? Here, we investigated such arbitrary conceptual relationships using a non-linguistic picture relatedness task in participants undergoing event-related brain potential recordings. Picture pairs arbitrarily related because of a compound and presented in the compound order elicited N400 amplitudes similar to unrelated pairs. Surprisingly, however, pictures presented in the reverse order (as in the sequence horse-sea) reduced N400 amplitudes significantly, demonstrating the existence of a link in memory between these two concepts otherwise unrelated. These results break new ground in the domain of linguistic relativity by revealing predicted semantic associations driven by lexical relations intrinsic to language.
语言相对论在颜色感知和物体分类等领域得到了实证支持。然而，语言特有的单词之间的关系是否会影响非语言的表达和概念化尚不清楚。例如，如果没有复合海马这个词的存在，人们是否会认为马和海这两个概念是相关的？在这里，我们使用参与者进行事件相关脑电位记录的非语言图片相关性任务来研究这种任意的概念关系。由于复合词而任意相关的图片对，以复合顺序呈现，诱发的 N400 幅度与不相关的图片对相似。然而，令人惊讶的是，以相反的顺序呈现的图片（如马-海的顺序）显著降低了 N400 幅度，这表明这两个原本不相关的概念在记忆中存在联系。这些结果通过揭示由语言内在的词汇关系驱动的预测语义关联，在语言相对论领域开辟了新的研究方向。
