| The study conducted four experiments to investigate the effect of Chinese and English speakers’ways of temporal thinking on language processing. Altogether three research questions were addressed:1) Do Chinese and English speakers differ in their habitual ways of temporal thinking?2) Do habitual ways of temporal thinking influence Chinese and English speakers’ first language processing?3) Do Chinese and English speakers’habitual ways of temporal thinking influence the processing of their second language (i.e., L2English for the Chinese and L2Chinese for the English)? A total of224native speakers of Chinese and119native speakers of English took part in this study, and each of them participated in only one of the four experiments.Most people around the world rely on space to think about time. For example. People can represent time via the horizontal axis (e.g., to conceive of temporal sequences as oriented from left to right) or the vertical axis (e.g., from top to bottom). Experiment1was undertaken to address whether Chinese and English speakers differ in their mental representations of spatial timelines. In this experiment the participants were asked to arrange in order a series of pictures depicting temporal sequences of natural events (referred to as "temporal arrangement task" in the following paragraph). Results show that the English participants and around80%of the Chinese participants display a common horizontal tendency for temporal cognition. Only around20%of the Chinese participants, who overwhelmingly rely on vertical axis to think about time, are different from the English participants.Based on the findings of Experiment1, three consecutive experiments (i.e.. Experiments2,3and4) were carried out to testify a hypothesis of "Thinking Affects Language Processing" proposed in this study. This hypothesis adopts a theoretical perspective opposite to that of Slobin’s "Thinking for Speaking"’hypothesis, because it concerns whether and how people’s ways of thinking affect their language processing. Experiments2-4focused on the influence of Chinese and English speakers’ ways of temporal thinking on their first language processing (Experiments2and3) and second language processing (Experiment4). In the three experiments, each participant needed to complete the temporal arrangement task and the priming task. The basic procedure of the priming task was as follows. A nonlinguistic prime (i.e., a horizontal or a vertical array of pictures depicting a temporal sequence of natural events) presented on the computer screen. Participants were asked to judge if the temporal sequence described in the pictures was in correct order. Immediately after that, a linguistic target (i.e., a statement describing a temporal relation like "March comes earlier than April") appeared on the computer screen. Participants were asked to verify whether the temporal order stated in the sentence was correct. The purpose of the priming task was to measure the effect of the nonlinguistic graphic prime on participants’processing of the linguistic target. Results of Experiments2-4demonstrate that:1) The habitual ways of thinking exert profound effects on first language processing. Both the Chinese and English participants who tend to perceive time in terms of a horizontal axis are faster to verify a temporal target sentence after a horizontal prime than after a vertical prime. Likewise, the Chinese participants who show salient vertical bias for temporal thinking are faster to verify a temporal target sentence after a vertical prime than after a horizontal prime.2) The habitual ways of thinking also exert significant influences on second language processing. To be specific, the habitual horizontal or vertical bias for temporal cognition displayed by the Chinese participants of L2English and the English participants of L2Chinese accelerate their second language processing. Taken together, the results yielded from Experiments2-4provide evidence in support of "Thinking Affects Language Processing" hypothesis. |
PDF Full Text Request