{"title":"EXPRESS: The Effect of Lexical Semantic Activation on Reasoning About Evolution: A Cross-linguistic Study.","authors":"Jingyi Liu, Laura Novick","doi":"10.1177/17470218241302677","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":20869,"journal":{"name":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","volume":" ","pages":"17470218241302677"},"PeriodicalIF":1.5000,"publicationDate":"2024-11-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1177/17470218241302677","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q4","JCRName":"PHYSIOLOGY","Score":null,"Total":0}
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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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.
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