Department of Special Education and Rehabilitation, University of Cologne, Herbert-Lewin-Str. 10, Cologne, 50931, Germany.
Department of Psychology, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany.
J Psycholinguist Res. 2021 Aug;50(4):843-861. doi: 10.1007/s10936-020-09750-3. Epub 2021 Mar 11.
How does non-linguistic, visual experience affect language production? A series of experiments addressed this question by examining linguistic and visual preferences for agent positions in transitive action scenarios. In Experiment 1, 30 native German speakers described event scenes where agents were positioned either to the right or to the left of patients. Produced utterances had longer speech onset times for scenes with right- rather than left-positioned agents, suggesting that the visual organization of events can affect sentence production. In Experiment 2 another cohort of 36 native German participants indicated their aesthetic preference for left- or right-positioned agents in mirrored scenes and displayed a preference for scenes with left-positioned agents. In Experiment 3, 37 Arabic native participants performed the same non-verbal task showing the reverse preference. Our findings demonstrate that non-linguistic visual preferences seem to affect sentence production, which in turn may rely on the writing system of a specific language.
非语言的视觉体验如何影响语言产生？一系列实验通过检查及物动作场景中语言和视觉对施事者位置的偏好来解决这个问题。在实验 1 中，30 名以德语为母语的参与者描述了施事者位于患者左侧或右侧的事件场景。与施事者位于左侧的场景相比，施事者位于右侧的场景产生的言语起始时间更长，这表明事件的视觉组织可以影响句子的产生。在实验 2 中，另一组 36 名以德语为母语的参与者在镜像场景中表示他们对左侧或右侧施事者位置的审美偏好，并表现出对左侧施事者位置的场景的偏好。在实验 3 中，37 名阿拉伯语母语参与者执行了相同的非言语任务，表现出相反的偏好。我们的发现表明，非语言的视觉偏好似乎会影响句子的产生，而句子的产生可能依赖于特定语言的书写系统。
