Ling
423/640G: Cognitive Linguistics
Ben
Bergen
Meeting 18:
Linguistic Relativism - Writing
October 23, 2008
The
world's languages use a range of writing systems, which are written in
different directions.
Reading
and writing in a particular language entails mastery of perceptual and motor
routines whose spatial characteristics are determined by the conventional
orientation of the writing system.
Does the
conventional direction of writing systems affect how language users interact
with and think about space beyond language?
Experiment 1: Image Recall
Does writing system
direction influence object 
recall?
Ss see an array of pictures on a
screen (3 sec), then recall as many as possible.
Instructions spoken
in Mandarin or English
Screen
divided into four quadrants of 9 items. Measured mean number of
responses/Q/subject.
Results:
Experiment 2: Sentence Production
Does
writing system direction influence scene interpretation?
Ss composed simple sentences based on ten pairs of images,
oriented right-left:
Tested whether the side where Ss tend to focus first corresponds
with writing direction.
English and Chinese speakers expected to take the left image as
the subject of the sentence more frequently than Taiwanese.
Significant influence of native language on sentence orientation
(ANOVA p<0.01), and between both Chinese and English and Taiwanese
(p<0.05).
Experiment 3: Arrangement
Does writing system direction
affect representation of temporal sequences?
Ss arranged pictures depicting 3 developmental stages of a natural
entity, like a plant or a human, from earliest to latest, e.g. seed / sapling /
big tree
Goal: do speakers of different languages arrange sequences in
different directions?
Five patterns observed (all but one subject produced the same
pattern for all trials)