Strickland Brent, Chemla Emmanuel
Département d'Etudes Cognitives, Ecole Normale Supérieure, PSL Research University, Paris, France.
Institut Jean Nicod (ENS, EHESS, CNRS), Paris, France.
PLoS One. 2018 Jan 11;13(1):e0184132. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0184132. eCollection 2018.
Recent research in infant cognition and adult vision suggests that the mechanical object relationships may be more salient and naturally attention grabbing than similar but non-mechanical relationships. Here we examine two novel sources of evidence from language related to this hypothesis. In Experiments 1 and 2, we show that adults preferentially infer that the meaning of a novel preposition refers to a mechanical as opposed to a non-mechanical relationship. Experiments 3 and 4 examine cross-linguistic adpositions obtained on a large scale from machines or from experts, respectively. While these methods differ in the ease of data collection relative to the reliability of the data, their results converge: we find that across a range of diverse and historically unrelated languages, adpositions (such as prepositions) referring to the mechanical relationships of containment (e.g "in") and support (e.g. "on") are systematically shorter than closely matched but not mechanical words such as "behind," "beside," "above," "over," "out," and "off." These results first suggest that languages regularly contain traces of core knowledge representations and that cross-linguistic regularities can therefore be a useful and easily accessible form of information that bears on the foundations of non-linguistic thought.
近期关于婴儿认知和成人视觉的研究表明，机械物体关系可能比类似但非机械的关系更显著，更能自然地吸引注意力。在此，我们研究了与该假设相关的来自语言的两个新证据来源。在实验1和实验2中，我们表明，成年人更倾向于推断一个新介词的含义指的是机械关系而非非机械关系。实验3和实验4分别研究了从机器或专家那里大规模获取的跨语言介词。虽然这些方法在数据收集的难易程度与数据可靠性方面存在差异，但它们的结果是一致的：我们发现，在一系列不同且历史上无关联的语言中，指包含（如“in”）和支撑（如“on”）等机械关系的介词，系统地比紧密匹配但非机械的词（如“behind”“beside”“above”“over”“out”和“off”）短。这些结果首先表明，语言中经常包含核心知识表征的痕迹，因此跨语言规律可能是一种有用且易于获取的信息形式，与非语言思维的基础相关。
