An Empirical Study Of Linguistic Relativity: The Cognitive Differences Of Nominal Number Marking In Bilinguals

The current thesis aims to revisit Whorf’s linguistic relativity and by conducting an empirical study of different number marking systems between English and Chinese to support the idea that certain linguistic patterns do influence, shape and alter human cognitive process.Lucy was the first scholar to study the relationship between number marking system and categorical preference (1992b). He contrasted number marking system in English and Yucatec May, an indigeous language in southeastern Mexico. His study showed that English monolinguals thought the changes in the amount of countable objects, such as animals and implements, more significant than uncountable objects, such as substances, whereas Yucatec monolinguals did not present such preference. The current thesis extends Lucy’s (1992b) study, comparing English monolinguals, Chinese monolinguals and Chinese L2English speakers.Chinese, like Yucate Maya, is a classifier language lacking a formal plural marking grammatical system.60participants, divided into four groups, were engaged in the empirical investigation. The stimuli used in the experiment were five sets of pictures, each set including six pictures, depicting the rural daily life. In each set, six pictures generally looked alike except one minor change. Picture1is the Original picture and the rest5pictures were its Alternates. Alternate2had a change in the number of animals. Alternate3and4had a change in the number of implements. Alternate5and6had a change in the amount of substances. The participants were first presented with the Original picture and then with5Alternates. They were asked to select which Alternate was most similar to the Original picture. Responses then were scored as the number of times that each participant selected a type of alternate (Animals, Implements or Substances) as most like the original pictures. SPSS software was employed then to conduct statistic analysis.The results showed contrastive selecting preference between English monolinguals and Chinese monolinguals. English monolinguals preferred Alternate5&6(Substance) as most similar to the Original picture, whereas Chinese monolinguals thought both Alternate3&4(Implements) and Alternate5&6(Substances) equally as most similar. What’s more, intermediate L2speakers behaved like Chinese monolinguals while advanced L2speakers behaved like English monolinguals. A conclusion could be drawn that different grammatical number system in languages may lead to different cognitive outcome. In addition, acquiring a grammatically-contrasted language may alter cognitive disposition that was previously established by LI.