Athanasopoulos Panos, Bylund Emanuel, Montero-Melis Guillermo, Damjanovic Ljubica, Schartner Alina, Kibbe Alexandra, Riches Nick, Thierry Guillaume
Department of Linguistics and English Language, Lancaster University
Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University.
Psychol Sci. 2015 Apr;26(4):518-26. doi: 10.1177/0956797614567509. Epub 2015 Mar 6.
People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into identifiable categories. The extent to which language affects this process has been the focus of a long-standing debate: Do different languages cause their speakers to behave differently? Here, we show that fluent German-English bilinguals categorize motion events according to the grammatical constraints of the language in which they operate. First, as predicted from cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding, bilingual participants functioning in a German testing context prefer to match events on the basis of motion completion to a greater extent than do bilingual participants in an English context. Second, when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in English, their categorization behavior is congruent with that predicted for German; when bilingual participants experience verbal interference in German, their categorization becomes congruent with that predicted for English. These findings show that language effects on cognition are context-bound and transient, revealing unprecedented levels of malleability in human cognition.
人们通过将周围的物体和事件归类到可识别的类别中来理解它们。语言在多大程度上影响这一过程一直是长期争论的焦点：不同的语言会导致其使用者的行为方式不同吗？在这里，我们表明，精通德语和英语的双语者会根据他们所使用语言的语法限制对运动事件进行分类。首先，正如从运动编码的跨语言差异所预测的那样，在德语测试环境中进行测试的双语参与者比在英语环境中的双语参与者更倾向于在更大程度上根据运动完成情况来匹配事件。其次，当双语参与者受到英语的言语干扰时，他们的分类行为与对德语所预测的行为一致；当双语参与者受到德语的言语干扰时，他们的分类就会与对英语所预测的行为一致。这些发现表明，语言对认知的影响是受上下文限制且短暂的，揭示了人类认知中前所未有的可塑性水平。
