Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL 60208, USA.
Department of Psychology, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK 74078, USA.
Sci Adv. 2023 Aug 18;9(33):eadh0064. doi: 10.1126/sciadv.adh0064. Epub 2023 Aug 16.
Language can have a powerful effect on how people experience events. Here, we examine how the languages people speak guide attention and influence what they remember from a visual scene. When hearing a word, listeners activate other similar-sounding words before settling on the correct target. We tested whether this linguistic coactivation during a visual search task changes memory for objects. Bilinguals and monolinguals remembered English competitor words that overlapped phonologically with a spoken English target better than control objects without name overlap. High Spanish proficiency also enhanced memory for Spanish competitors that overlapped across languages. We conclude that linguistic diversity partly accounts for differences in higher cognitive functions such as memory, with multilinguals providing a fertile ground for studying the interaction between language and cognition.
语言对人们体验事件的方式有着强大的影响。在这里，我们研究了人们所说的语言如何引导注意力，并影响他们对视觉场景的记忆。当人们听到一个词时，他们会在确定正确的目标之前激活其他发音相似的词。我们测试了这种在视觉搜索任务中发生的语言共同激活是否会改变对物体的记忆。双语者和单语者比没有名称重叠的控制物体更好地记住了与英语口语目标在语音上重叠的英语竞争者单词。西班牙语水平高也增强了对语言重叠的西班牙语竞争者的记忆。我们的结论是，语言多样性在记忆等高级认知功能的差异中起着一定的作用，双语者为研究语言和认知之间的相互作用提供了肥沃的土壤。
