Junior Research Group "Primate Kin Selection", Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Department of Primatology, Deutscher Platz 6, 04103, Leipzig, Germany.
University of Leipzig Faculty of Life Science, Institute of Biology, Behavioral Ecology Research Group, Talstrasse 33, 04103, Leipzig, Germany.
Sci Rep. 2019 Feb 4;9(1):1124. doi: 10.1038/s41598-018-37654-9.
The relationship between language and thought is controversial. One hypothesis is that language fosters habits of processing information that are retained even in non-linguistic domains. In left-branching (LB) languages, modifiers usually precede the head, and real-time sentence comprehension may more heavily rely on retaining initial information in working memory. Here we presented a battery of working memory and short-term memory tasks to adult native speakers of four LB and four right-branching (RB) languages from Africa, Asia and Europe. In working memory tasks, LB speakers were better than RB speakers at recalling initial stimuli, but worse at recalling final stimuli. Our results show that the practice of parsing sentences in specific directions due to the syntax and word order of our native language not only predicts the way we remember words, but also other non-linguistic stimuli.
语言和思维之间的关系是有争议的。有一种假设认为，语言促进了信息处理的习惯，这些习惯即使在非语言领域也能保留下来。在左分支（LB）语言中，修饰语通常在中心语之前，实时句子理解可能更依赖于在工作记忆中保留初始信息。在这里，我们向来自非洲、亚洲和欧洲的 4 种 LB 和 4 种 RB 语言的成年母语使用者展示了一系列工作记忆和短期记忆任务。在工作记忆任务中，LB 语言使用者在回忆初始刺激方面优于 RB 语言使用者，但在回忆最终刺激方面则较差。我们的结果表明，由于我们母语的语法和词序，以特定方向解析句子的做法不仅可以预测我们记忆单词的方式，还可以预测其他非语言刺激的方式。
