Affiliation:
1. 1Department of English Literature and Language, Konan University, 8-9-1 Okamoto, Higashinada-ku, Kobe 658-8501, Japan
Abstract
AbstractThis study examines whether the sentence structure of particular languages predisposes speakers to particular attentional patterns. We hypothesized that the holistic attentional bias of Japanese participants observed in a previous study (Masuda and Nisbett 2001), attributed in that paper to pan-Asian cultural factors, is better interpreted as a consequence of specific linguistic properties of Japanese: namely, sentence structure. In experiments involving Japanese, English and Chinese native speakers, it was found that Japanese participants reported more Ground information before mentioning Figure information, mentioned more background details overall, and remembered background elements in a subsequent recall task significantly more accurately than either English or Chinese participants. The “Asian response” was thus split, as predicted by the grammatical typology of Japanese and Chinese. Our results therefore support a linguistic interpretation of Japanese-English differences, and run counter to the previous explanation in terms of culture.
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Developmental and Educational Psychology,Language and Linguistics
Cited by
12 articles.
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