Similar In Surface Or Structure: The Relationship Between Bilingualism And Similarity

With the development of economic globalization,bilingual or even multilingual people are becoming more and more common.For students who are learning a second language,bilingual experience can not only help them master a skill,but also improve their creativity,problem solving and analogy transfer.Research shows that one of the key factors of problem solving and analogical transfer is to find similarities between things.However,existing studies have not explored the relationship between bilingualism and similarity.Similarity can be divided into surface similarity and structure similarity.Surface similarity is generally used to indicate that surface features are similar,but the lack of causality between problems has nothing to do with solutions.The structural similarity in similarity refers to the causal relationship between the key components of the source problem and the target problem or the common principle of solution.On the surface,similar problems involve simple contents,while for more complex problems,we usually need to find similar structures.Therefore,this study examines whether the more proficient bilingual individuals are,the easier it is to find structural similarities between things.In this study,subjects middle school student with high bilingual proficiency and low bilingual proficiency were selected,and they were asked to judge two types of analogy materials: stories and pictures.In Experiment 1,the subjects were presented with three story materials,namely baseline story,structurally similar story and superficially similar story.After reading the story materials,the subjects were asked to choose a story similar to the baseline story.The experimental results show that compared with the bilingual unskilled group,the bilingual skilled group has a higher proportion of stories with similar structure.Experiment 2 further examined the relationship between bilingualism and structural similarity,and changed the experimental task from analogy story material to analogy picture material.The experimental results found that compared with the bilingual unskilled subjects,the bilingual proficient subjects chose more people with similar picture structure.The results of this study show that the more proficient bilingual individuals are,the easier they are to find structural similarities.