School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 800 Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, Shanghai 200240, China; Department of Psychology, Harvard University, 33 Kirkland St, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
School of Foreign Languages, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No. 800 Dongchuan Road, Minhang District, Shanghai 200240, China.
Cognition. 2018 Feb;171:108-111. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2017.10.022. Epub 2017 Nov 8.
Past work has shown systematic differences between Easterners' and Westerners' intuitions about the reference of proper names. Understanding when these differences emerge in development will help us understand their origins. In the present study, we investigate the referential intuitions of English- and Chinese-speaking children and adults in the U.S. and China. Using a truth-value judgment task modeled on Kripke's classic Gödel case, we find that the cross-cultural differences are already in place at age seven. Thus, these differences cannot be attributed to later education or enculturation. Instead, they must stem from differences that are present in early childhood. We consider alternate theories of reference that are compatible with these findings and discuss the possibility that the cross-cultural differences reflect differences in perspective-taking strategies.
过去的研究表明，东方人和西方人对专有名词的指称的直觉存在系统性差异。了解这些差异在发展过程中何时出现，将有助于我们理解它们的起源。在本研究中，我们调查了美国和中国的英语和汉语儿童和成年人的指称直觉。我们使用了一种基于克里普克经典哥德尔案例的真值判断任务，发现这种跨文化差异早在 7 岁时就已经存在。因此，这些差异不能归因于后期的教育或文化熏陶。相反，它们必须源于幼儿期就存在的差异。我们考虑了与这些发现相一致的其他参照理论，并讨论了这种跨文化差异是否反映了不同的观点采择策略的可能性。
