EXPRESS: The Effect of Lexical Semantic Activation on Reasoning About Evolution: A Cross-linguistic Study.

IF 1.5 3区心理学 Q4 PHYSIOLOGY

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Pub Date : 2024-11-14 DOI:10.1177/17470218241302677

Jingyi Liu, Laura Novick

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

We hypothesized that people of different language backgrounds (English vs. Mandarin Chinese) might think about evolutionary relationships among living things differently. In particular, some reasoning heuristics may come from how living things are named. Our research examined if sub-word and sub-lexical elements in written Chinese influence people's inferences. Some taxon names in Chinese are conjunctive concepts that include another taxon: e.g., panda is called bear cat in Chinese, and the skunk character has a semantic radical (semantic component of a character) that means mouse. These conjunctions might influence Chinese readers to infer that conjunctive concepts share biological characteristics with their constituents (e.g., that skunks share biological properties with mice). Readers in a language (English) without lexical activation from constituents of conjunctive concepts would not be expected to show such effects. This research provided insights into how differences in prior knowledge due to different language backgrounds affect thinking and reasoning.

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表达：词汇语义激活对进化推理的影响：跨语言研究

我们假设，不同语言背景的人（英语与普通话）可能会以不同的方式思考生物之间的进化关系。特别是，一些推理启发法可能来自于生物的命名方式。我们的研究考察了书面中文中的分词和分词汇是否会影响人们的推理。中文中的一些类群名称是包含另一个类群的连接概念：例如，熊猫在中文中被称为熊猫，而鼬字有一个语义部首（字的语义成分），意思是老鼠。这些连词可能会影响中文读者推断出连词概念与其成分具有共同的生物特征（例如，臭鼬与老鼠具有共同的生物属性）。而在一种语言（英语）中，如果连词概念的成分没有词性激活，读者就不会受到这种影响。这项研究为了解不同语言背景造成的先验知识差异如何影响思维和推理提供了启示。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 医学-生理学

CiteScore

3.50

自引率

5.90%

发文量

178

审稿时长

3-8 weeks

期刊介绍： Promoting the interests of scientific psychology and its researchers, QJEP, the journal of the Experimental Psychology Society, is a leading journal with a long-standing tradition of publishing cutting-edge research. Several articles have become classic papers in the fields of attention, perception, learning, memory, language, and reasoning. The journal publishes original articles on any topic within the field of experimental psychology (including comparative research). These include substantial experimental reports, review papers, rapid communications (reporting novel techniques or ground breaking results), comments (on articles previously published in QJEP or on issues of general interest to experimental psychologists), and book reviews. Experimental results are welcomed from all relevant techniques, including behavioural testing, brain imaging and computational modelling. QJEP offers a competitive publication time-scale. Accepted Rapid Communications have priority in the publication cycle and usually appear in print within three months. We aim to publish all accepted (but uncorrected) articles online within seven days. Our Latest Articles page offers immediate publication of articles upon reaching their final form. The journal offers an open access option called Open Select, enabling authors to meet funder requirements to make their article free to read online for all in perpetuity. Authors also benefit from a broad and diverse subscription base that delivers the journal contents to a world-wide readership. Together these features ensure that the journal offers authors the opportunity to raise the visibility of their work to a global audience.