Ansorge Ulrich, Baier Diane, Choi Soonja
Faculty of Psychology, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Cognitive Science Hub, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria.
Front Psychol. 2022 May 20;13:875744. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.875744. eCollection 2022.
How does the language we speak affect our perception? Here, we argue for linguistic relativity and present an explanation through "language-induced automatized stimulus-driven attention" (LASA): Our respective mother tongue influences our attention and, hence, perception, and in this sense determines what we see. As LASA is highly practiced throughout life, it is difficult to suppress, and even shows in language-independent non-linguistic tasks. We argue that attention is involved in language-dependent processing and point out that automatic or stimulus-driven forms of attention, albeit initially learned as serving a linguistic skill, account for linguistic relativity as they are automatized and generalize to non-linguistic tasks. In support of this possibility, we review evidence for such automatized stimulus-driven attention in language-independent non-linguistic tasks. We conclude that linguistic relativity is possible and in fact a reality, although it might not be as powerful as assumed by some of its strongest proponents.
我们所说的语言如何影响我们的认知？在此，我们支持语言相对论，并通过“语言诱导的自动化刺激驱动注意”（LASA）给出一种解释：我们各自的母语会影响我们的注意力，进而影响认知，从这个意义上说，它决定了我们所看到的东西。由于LASA在一生中都被高度运用，所以很难被抑制，甚至在与语言无关的非语言任务中也会表现出来。我们认为注意力参与了依赖语言的加工过程，并指出，尽管自动或刺激驱动的注意力形式最初是作为一种语言技能来学习的，但由于它们被自动化并推广到非语言任务中，所以可以解释语言相对论。为了支持这种可能性，我们回顾了在与语言无关的非语言任务中这种自动化刺激驱动注意的证据。我们得出结论，语言相对论是可能的，事实上也是现实，尽管它可能不像一些最坚定的支持者所设想的那么强大。
