He Hu, Li Jie, Xiao Qianguo, Jiang Songxiu, Yang Yisheng, Zhi Sheng
College of Educational Science, Inner Mongolia Normal University, Hohhot, China.
Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region Key Laboratory of Psychology, Hohhot, China.
Front Psychol. 2019 Mar 14;10:551. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00551. eCollection 2019.
The present research contributes to the debate in cognitive sentence on the relationship between language and perception by comparing Mongolian and Chinese speakers' color perception. In this study, featuring a free sorting task and a visual search task comparing Mongolian and Chinese performances, the results show that both universal and relativistic forces are at play. Chinese (Mandarin) and Mongolian color terms divide the blue spectrum differently but the green spectrum, similarly. In Mongolian, light blue ("") and dark blue ("") are strictly distinct, while both light green and dark green are described as one word, . In Chinese, however, both light blue and dark blue are simply described by one word, , and both light green and dark green are described by a single word, . The current study used a free-sorting task and a visual search task to investigate whether this linguistic difference between Chinese and Mongolian speakers leads to a difference in color discrimination. In the free-sorting task, compared with Chinese speakers, Mongolian speakers exhibited different sorting in the blue region (by distinguishing light and dark blue) and the same sorting in the green region. Further results showed that Mongolian speakers discriminated visual search displays that fall into different linguistic categories in Mongolian (e.g., or ) more quickly than visual search displays that belong to the same linguistic category (e.g., both ) in a visual search task. Moreover, this effect was disrupted in Mongolian participants who performed a secondary task engaging involving verbal working memory (but not a task engaging involving spatial working memory), suggested linguistic interference. Chinese (Mandarin) speakers performing the visual search task did not show such a category advantage under any of the conditions. The finding provides support for the Whorf hypothesis with evidence from an Altay language. Meanwhile, both Chinese and Mongolian speakers reacted faster to the green color than the blue color in the visual search task, suggesting that the variation in human color perception is constrained by certain universal forces. The difference in categorical effects between Chinese and Mongolian speakers in the blue region suggests a relativistic aspect of language and color perception, while the speed of visual search in blue and green suggests a universalistic aspect of language and color perception. Thus, our findings suggest that our perception is shaped by both relativistic and universal forces.
本研究通过比较蒙古族和汉族 speakers 的颜色感知，为认知语言学中关于语言与感知关系的争论做出了贡献。在这项研究中，通过一个自由分类任务和一个比较蒙古族和汉族表现的视觉搜索任务，结果表明普遍因素和相对因素都在起作用。汉语（普通话）和蒙古语的颜色术语对蓝色光谱的划分不同，但对绿色光谱的划分相似。在蒙古语中，浅蓝色（“”）和深蓝色（“”）严格区分，而浅绿色和深绿色都用一个词“”来描述。然而，在汉语中，浅蓝色和深蓝色都只用一个词“”来描述，浅绿色和深绿色也用一个词“”来描述。本研究使用自由分类任务和视觉搜索任务来调查汉语和蒙古语 speakers 之间的这种语言差异是否会导致颜色辨别上的差异。在自由分类任务中，与汉族 speakers 相比，蒙古族 speakers 在蓝色区域表现出不同的分类（区分浅蓝色和深蓝色），而在绿色区域分类相同。进一步的结果表明，在视觉搜索任务中，蒙古族 speakers 能够更快地区分蒙古语中属于不同语言类别的视觉搜索显示（例如“”或“”），而对于属于同一语言类别的视觉搜索显示（例如两个“”）则不然。此外，在执行涉及言语工作记忆的次要任务（但不涉及空间工作记忆的任务）的蒙古族参与者中，这种效应受到了干扰，这表明存在语言干扰。执行视觉搜索任务的汉语（普通话）speakers 在任何条件下都没有表现出这种类别优势。这一发现为沃尔夫假说提供了来自阿尔泰语系语言的证据支持。同时，在视觉搜索任务中，汉语和蒙古语 speakers 对绿色的反应都比对蓝色的反应更快，这表明人类颜色感知的差异受到某些普遍因素的限制。汉语和蒙古语 speakers 在蓝色区域的类别效应差异表明了语言与颜色感知的相对因素，而蓝色和绿色视觉搜索的速度则表明了语言与颜色感知的普遍因素。因此，我们的研究结果表明，我们的感知是由相对因素和普遍因素共同塑造的。
