The Influence Of Chinese And English Speakers' Space Perception On Online Sentence Processing

In the domain of space is there any difference in figure-ground perception sequence(ground-before-figure/figure-before-ground)between Chinese and English native speakers?If there is,would the sequence affect their online language comprehension?Four experiments were carried out to investigate these questions and testify a hypothesis "Space Perception Affect Language Processing" proposed in the study.Using the domain of space as a testbed,this hypothesis enriched Tohidian's idea of "thought affect language" in general and Yang Wenxing's hypothesis "Thinking Affects Language Processing" proposed in the domain of time.Four experiments were conducted to investigate(1)Do Chinese and English native speakers demonstrate different ways in their space perception?(2)Does the space perception of Chinese and English speakers' influence the online processing of their first language?(3)Does the space perception of Chinese English learners' influence the online processing of their second language?A total of 203 native speakers of Chinese and 123 native speakers of English took part in this study,and each of them participated in only one of the four experiments.The first experiment employed nonlinguistic task to investigate research question one,in which the participants were asked to form a new picture with the given two pictures i.e.background and figure.The experiment demonstrated that Chinese speakers exhibit predominantly ground-before-figure sequence(100%)while English speakers showed three types of figure-ground perception:ground-before-figure(51.61%);figure-before-ground(32.25%)and balanced pattern of these two(16.12%).Based on the findings of Experiment 1,three consecutive experiments(experiment 2,3,and 4)were conducted to further testify the hypothesis of "Space Perception Affect Language Processing".Experiments 2 and 3 focused on the influence of space perception on Chinese and English speakers' on their first language processing,and experiment 4 investigated the influence of the space perception of Chinese English language learners' on their second language processing.In Experiment 2,3 and 4,each participant needed to finish a priming task.Experiment 2 investigated the impact of primed figure-ground sequence on Chinese and English native speakers' picture-text consistency judgments.Experiment 3 further examined the impact of primed figure-ground sequence on Chinese and English native speakers' logical judgments.Results showed that the primed figure-ground sequence affect both Chinese and English native speakers' picture-text consistency judgments and logical judgments.The priming task serves as a way to measure the impact of the nonlinguistic figure-ground priming on participants' processing of the linguistic target.Based on the findings of Experiment 1,2 and 3,Experiment 4 was carried out.Experiment 4 adopted the same procedure with Experiment 3.The only difference is that for Chinese native participants,the linguistic target is in English.Experiment 4 found that the primed figure-ground sequence affect Chinese English learners' online language processing.This research provided evidence for the impact of cognition on language processing online in general,and for the hypothesis "Space Perception Affect Language Processing" in particular.