Colorado College, 14 E. Cache La Poudre St., Colorado Springs, CO, 80903, USA.
Department of Psychology, Lehigh University, 17 Memorial Drive East, Bethlehem, PA, 18015, USA.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2017 Dec;24(6):2031-2036. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1268-x.
The spatial relation of support has been regarded as universally privileged in nonlinguistic cognition and immune to the influence of language. English, but not Korean, obligatorily distinguishes support from nonsupport via basic spatial terms. Despite this linguistic difference, previous research suggests that English and Korean speakers show comparable nonlinguistic sensitivity to the support/nonsupport distinction. Here, using a paradigm previously found to elicit cross-language differences in color discrimination, we provide evidence for a difference in sensitivity to support/nonsupport between native English speakers and native Korean speakers who were late English learners and tested in a context that privileged Korean. Whereas the former group showed categorical perception (CP) when discriminating spatial scenes capturing the support/nonsupport distinction, the latter did not. An additional group of native Korean speakers-relatively early English learners tested in an English-salient context-patterned with the native English speakers in showing CP for support/nonsupport. These findings suggest that obligatory marking of support/nonsupport in one's native language can affect nonlinguistic sensitivity to this distinction, contra earlier findings, but that such sensitivity may also depend on aspects of language background and the immediate linguistic context.
支持的空间关系在非语言认知中被认为是普遍的特权，不受语言的影响。英语，但不是韩语，通过基本的空间术语强制性地区分支持和不支持。尽管存在这种语言差异，但先前的研究表明，英语和韩语使用者在非语言上对支持/不支持的区分表现出相似的敏感性。在这里，我们使用了一种先前被发现会在颜色辨别中产生跨语言差异的范式，为母语为英语的人和母语为韩语的人之间对支持/不支持的敏感性差异提供了证据，这些母语为韩语的人是后期英语学习者，并且在偏向韩语的环境中进行了测试。前者在区分捕捉支持/不支持区别的空间场景时表现出了范畴知觉（CP），而后者则没有。另一组母语为韩语的人——相对较早的英语学习者，在英语突出的环境中进行测试，他们的表现与母语为英语的人相似，对支持/不支持表现出 CP。这些发现表明，母语中对支持/不支持的强制性标记会影响对这种区别的非语言敏感性，这与早期的发现相反，但这种敏感性也可能取决于语言背景和当前语言环境的各个方面。
