Masuda Takahiko, Ishii Keiko, Miwa Koji, Rashid Marghalara, Lee Hajin, Mahdi Rania
Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.
Department of Psychology, Kobe University, Kobe, Japan.
Front Psychol. 2017 Sep 26;8:1637. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01637. eCollection 2017.
Recent findings have re-examined the linguistic influence on cognition and perception, while identifying evidence that supports the Whorfian hypothesis. We examine how English and Japanese speakers perceive similarity of pairs of objects, by using two sets of stimuli: one in which two distinct linguistic categories apply to respective object images in English, but only one linguistic category applies in Japanese; and another in which two distinct linguistic categories apply to respective object images in Japanese, but only one applies in English. We conducted four studies and tested different groups of participants in each of them. In Study 1, we asked participants to name the two objects before engaging in the similarity judgment task. Here, we expected a strong linguistic effect. In Study 2, we asked participants to engage in the same task without naming, where we assumed that the condition is close enough to our daily visual information processing where language is not necessarily prompted. We further explored whether the language still influences the similarity perception by asking participants to engage in the same task basing on the visual similarity (Study 3) and the functional similarity (Study 4). The results overall indicated that English and Japanese speakers perceived the two objects to be more similar when they were in the same linguistic categories than when they were in different linguistic categories in their respective languages. Implications for research testing the Whorfian hypothesis and the requirement for methodological development beyond behavioral measures are discussed.
最近的研究重新审视了语言对认知和感知的影响，同时发现了支持沃尔夫假说的证据。我们通过使用两组刺激来研究说英语和日语的人如何感知物体对的相似性：一组中，两个不同的语言类别适用于英语中各自的物体图像，但在日语中只适用一个语言类别；另一组中，两个不同的语言类别适用于日语中各自的物体图像，但在英语中只适用一个。我们进行了四项研究，并在每项研究中测试了不同的参与者群体。在研究1中，我们要求参与者在进行相似性判断任务之前说出这两个物体的名称。在这里，我们预期会有强烈的语言效应。在研究2中，我们要求参与者在不命名的情况下进行相同的任务，我们认为这种情况与我们日常的视觉信息处理足够接近，在日常处理中不一定会引发语言。我们通过要求参与者基于视觉相似性（研究3）和功能相似性（研究4）进行相同的任务，进一步探究语言是否仍然影响相似性感知。总体结果表明，说英语和日语的人在各自语言中，当两个物体属于相同语言类别时比属于不同语言类别时，会觉得它们更相似。本文讨论了对检验沃尔夫假说的研究的启示以及超越行为测量的方法发展的要求。
