The Effect of Language-Specific Characteristics on English and Japanese Speakers' Ability to Recall Number Information

© 2020 Cognitive Science Society, Inc..

The current paper presents two experiments investigating the effect of presence versus absence of compulsory number marking in a native language on a speaker's ability to recall number information from photos. In Experiment 1, monolingual English and Japanese adults were shown a sequence of 110 photos after which they were asked questions about the photos. We found that the English participants showed a significantly higher accuracy rate for questions testing recall for number information when the correct answer was "2" (instead of "1") than Japanese participants. In Experiment 2, English and Japanese adults engaged in the same task as in Experiment 1 with an addition that explored reasons for the results found in Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 2 were in line with the results of Experiment 1, but also suggested that the results could not be attributed to differences in guessing patterns between the two groups or the type of linguistic constructions used in the test situations. The current study suggests that native language affects speakers' ability to recall number information from scenes and thus provides evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis.

Medienart:

E-Artikel

Erscheinungsjahr:

2020

Erschienen:

2020

Enthalten in:

Zur Gesamtaufnahme - volume:44

Enthalten in:

Cognitive science - 44(2020), 12 vom: 11. Dez., Seite e12923

Sprache:

Englisch

Beteiligte Personen:

Kirjavainen, Minna [VerfasserIn]
Kite, Yuriko [VerfasserIn]
Piasecki, Anna E [VerfasserIn]

Links:

Volltext

Themen:

English
Japanese
Journal Article
Linguistic relativity
Number marking
Plurality
Recall
Visual memory
Whorfian hypothesis

Anmerkungen:

Date Completed 18.08.2021

Date Revised 18.08.2021

published: Print

Citation Status MEDLINE

doi:

10.1111/cogs.12923

funding:

Förderinstitution / Projekttitel:

PPN (Katalog-ID):

NLM318711885