The Influence Of Language Structures On Inductive Reasoning By Chinese Learners Of Japanese

Inductive reasoning is the thinking process during which people conclude general rules from some individual knowledges. Former studies prove that the mechanism of inductive reasoning can be estimated to be based on language knowledge structure, by constructing computational models of inductive reasoning which is based on a probabilistic language structure estimated by the statistical analysis of different language data.The purpose of this study is to utilize computational models of inductive reasoning based on probabilistic language structures of Chinese and Japanese in a research taking Japanese language learners whose mother tongue is Chinese as testers, and to examine whether different languages’ structure influence on learners’ inductive reasoning.The study desgined psychological experiments of inductive reasoning using two types of language: Chinese and Japanese. Both models ouput simulation results for 8 themes of topic and these results were selected to be used as questions in experiments. Japanese language learners were separated into groups and each of them took part of the two-type experiments. By comparing results from the experiments and simulation results conclusions of this study are:Firstly, the length of the period of time staying in Japan has positive influence on learners’ acquisiting Japanese language structure. No matter what the experiment language is, learners who has stayed ‘6 months or longer’ i n Japan has higher correlations with model results than those stayed ‘shorter than 6 months’.Secondly, different language of experiments’ influence on leaeners’ inductive reasoning were not found. This might be explained as that participants’ Japanese language ability in this research are all high and there were only slight differences among them.For future study, firstly, it is needed to improve computational model of Japanese language. Psychological experiment is to be conducted on the newly constructed model which contained data of ‘noun-adjective’ relations. By applying improved models of both language s, the research study will take learners of different Japanese language abilities as participants.