Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Recent approaches on embodied cognition and theories of semantic and conceptual “grounding” have emphasized the role of perceptual and motor skills in language comprehension and action understanding. Evidence on the role of sensorimotor information in language processing has been obtained from behavioral and neuroimaging studies. These findings have been taken as a support for the claim that language is understood through sensorimotor simulations of actions and events being described. The theory on Perceptual Symbol Systems holds that the sensorimotor system participates in the language comprehension process, which is an empirical simulation of a situation through a series of complex language cues. Chinese characters may show different characteristics from English words because semantic radicals are linked with the meaning of these characters. These semantic radicals may affect the embodied effect of Chinese characters.In the study, authors used single-character body action verbs in Chinese as experimental materials. Body action verbs are words that use body parts to perform mechanical movements. The directional semantic feature of body action verbs reflects the direction of physical space and can be perceived. Experiment 1 investigated the influence of semantic direction on the spatial judgment of an arrow direction in the motion channel under whole word priming. The repeated measurement design of 2 (Chinese character embodied direction: up/down) × 2 (arrow direction: up/down) was adopted. Thirty-five participants volunteered in this study. Experiment 2 investigated the influence of semantic orientation on the spatial judgment of letter orientation in visual channels under whole word initiation. The repeated measurement design of 2 (Chinese character direction: up/down) × 2 (letter position: up/down) design was used. Thirty-eight participants took part in this experiment. Experiment 3 investigated the embodied simulation of the semantic radical and whole character under the radical priming paradigm. Chinese body action verbs formed by semantic radicals “扌” and “?” were used as experimental materials. A within-subject design of 2 (priming type: semantic radical’s priming/control priming) × 3 (character type: consistent/inconsistent) × 3 (SOA: 43 ms/72 ms/243 ms) was used. Before the behavioral experiment, the participants were asked to hold their hands up for one minute to reinforce the bodybuilding experience of having their hands above and their feet below. Character type shows the direction and orientation between the character and its semantic radical. Consistent character type means that the character and its semantic radical have a similar direction and orientation. For example, the semantic radical “?” means “foot, ” which is below the body. Thus, “蹲” is a consistent character, whereas “跳” is an inconsistent character.Results suggest the following: (1) When Chinese characters are in a downward semantic direction, the downward arrow is judged faster than the upward arrow. When characters are in an upward semantic direction, the direction of the arrow has a null effect. (2) Chinese characters with upward semantic movement can be used to recognize upper letters more quickly and characters with downward semantic movement can be used to recognize lower letters more quickly. (3) In the middle and late stages of Chinese character processing, the response of consistent and inconsistent Chinese characters is significantly different, indicating that the semantic radical is activated from the middle stage of the Chinese character processing until the late stage.The present findings demonstrate the following: (1) An action-character compatibility effect is present in Chinese body movement verbs in the movement and visual channels. Understanding Chinese body movement verbs is a cross-channel embodied simulation process. (2) The semantic radical activation of the phonogram starts from the middle stage to the late stage of Chinese body action verb processing. A semantic understanding of Chinese body action verbs has an embodied simulation at the whole character and component (semantic radical) levels.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： There are three major dialects in Guangdong: Cantonese, Chaoshan, and Hakka. These dialects mainly formed during the southward migration of the Han people in the Central Plains, but they are different in language source, evolution history, and name. From the perspective of language itself, the Hakka dialect is the smallest variation of Mandarin, Cantonese medium, and Chaoshan the largest. In terms of language-variation completion time, the Hakka dialect occurred most recently, followed by Cantonese, with Chaoshan occurring the earliest. Regarding the dialect names, a morpheme of “Ke” exists in the name Hakka, which always reminds its speakers that their ancestors are from the Central Plains, while Cantonese and Chaoshan are named after each locality. An interesting question has been whether these differences among the three dialects affect the speaker’s information processing of the Central Plains group. Guangdong college students who speak only one dialect of Hakka, Cantonese, and Chaoshan were grouped according to their language background in the present study. One hundred and eighty participants took part in two experiments, 90 per experiment. In experiment 1, the group reference R/K paradigm was used to investigate whether speakers of different dialects had a different memory effect on the Central Plains group compared with that on an unrelated group. Experiment 2 adopted the “starting stroop paradigm”; that is, using different group names as the starting stimulus, and personality adjectives with different valences as target stimuli, the participants were asked to judge the color of the target stimuli. Experiment 1 found that the participants had a superior memory of their own group, but only Hakka dialect speakers experienced a group reference effect on the information processing of the Central Plains group, which resulted in a better memory effect on the Central Plains group than that on the unrelated group. The results of experiment 2 showed that the participants had the longest reaction time under the condition that their own ethnic group name was activated, but only the Hakka participants responded more slowly to the Henan ethnic group than to the unrelated ethnic group. The results of both experiments indicated that all the three dialect groups had processing advantages regarding the information of their own groups that manifested in the obvious referential effect of their own groups and the attention bias of their own information. Moreover, the Hakka participants’ cognition regarding the Central Plains group represented by “Henan people” is significantly different from that of Cantonese and Chaoshan dialect speakers. The research results suggested that language evolution affected ethnic information processing. The identity of ethnic groups with the same ancestry could be enhanced by keeping the characteristics of ancestral language completely and strengthening the relationship between dialect and ancestral language. The results have important implications for the construction of Chinese Community Consciousness.
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