Unit of Neuroscience, Department of Medicine and Surgery, University of Parma, 43126, Parma, Italy.
Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA.
Sci Rep. 2024 Jun 4;14(1):12781. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-61891-w.
In this study we carried out a behavioral experiment comparing action language comprehension in L1 (Italian) and L2 (English). Participants were Italian native speakers who had acquired the second language late (after the age of 10). They performed semantic judgments on L1 and L2 literal, idiomatic and metaphorical action sentences after viewing a video of a hand performing an action that was related or unrelated to the verb used in the sentence. Results showed that responses to literal and metaphorical L1 sentences were faster when the action depicted was related to the verb used rather than when the action depicted was unrelated to the verb used. No differences were found for the idiomatic condition. In L2 we found that all responses to the three conditions were facilitated when the action depicted was related to the verb used. Moreover, we found that the difference between the unrelated and the related modalities was greater in L2 than in L1 for the literal and the idiomatic condition but not for the metaphorical condition. These findings are consistent with the embodied cognition hypothesis of language comprehension.
在这项研究中，我们进行了一项行为实验，比较了母语为意大利语（L1）和第二语言为英语（L2）的语言理解能力。参与者是意大利语母语者，他们在 10 岁以后才开始学习第二语言。他们在观看了一段与句子中动词相关或不相关的手的动作视频后，对 L1 和 L2 的字面、惯用和隐喻动作句子进行了语义判断。结果表明，当所描述的动作与使用的动词相关时，对字面和隐喻的 L1 句子的反应更快，而当所描述的动作与动词不相关时则较慢。在惯用条件下则没有发现差异。在 L2 中，我们发现当所描述的动作与动词相关时，所有三种条件下的反应都得到了促进。此外，我们发现，在字面和惯用条件下，L2 中不相关和相关模态之间的差异大于 L1，但在隐喻条件下则没有差异。这些发现与语言理解的具身认知假说一致。
