Can Learning a Foreign Language Shape Our Thought?
According to the Whorfian hypothesis, language determines certain nonlinguistic cognitive processes (linguistic determinism), and speakers of different languages think differently. It follows that learning a language can change the way people think. Indeed, many studies have demonstrated that a speakers native language can shape his/her thought. However, whether learning a foreign language can change the way people think seems to depend on many factors such as age, learning time, learning strategies, and learning environment etc. In this pilot study we investigated whether learning English can affect Taiwanese EFL students habitual thought for space. In English, spatial relations between objects are expressed by prepositions which convey the spatial relations in a more specific way than do the locative phrases in Mandarin Chinese. For example, the locative phrase 在房子中間 in Chinese can either correspond to between the houses or in the middle of the house in English. The spatial arrangement conveyed by the locative particle 中間 is more ambiguous than that is specified by the corresponding English prepositions - between and in the middle of. Due to this kind of crosslinguistic differences, is it possible that learning English can change the way Mandarin Chinese speakers conceptualize space? Two experiments were carried out in this study. In Experiment 1, we investigated whether learners with different English proficiency levels (high versus low) would perform similar in matching Chinese sentences with their corresponding spatial layouts. In Experiment 2, we adopted a priming paradigm to examine whether the priming effect will be more pronounced for students with high English proficiency than for students with low English proficiency. A 2 by 2 mixed factorial design with the two main factors - language proficiency (high versus low) and prime type (positive versus negative) was used to investigate this issue. The results indicated that even though the EFL students learned how to conceptualize space in English, learning English seemed not to shape their habitual thought for space.
Ying-Hua Guan Pei-Chen Lin
Department of Applied Chinese Languages and Literature National Taiwan Normal University Department of Applied Linguistics and Language Studies Chung Yuan Christian University
国际会议
2009 International Conference on Applied Linguistics & Language Teaching(2009应用语言学暨语言教学国际研讨会)
台湾
英文
87-97
2009-04-01（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）