Psycholinguistic Implications for Linguistic Relativity

A Case Study of Chinese

Rumjahn Hoosain

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134763771
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Desarrollo personal
• Subtopic: Habilidades de escritura y presentación

Rather than offering variations in "world view" as evidence for linguistic relativity, this book views language related differences in terms of the facility with which information is processed. Distinctive perceptual, memory, and neurolinguistic aspects of the Chinese language are discussed, as is the cognitive style of the Chinese people. Chinese orthography and other features of morphology and syntax are examined in relation to both bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes. While providing an extensive review of the experimental literature published in English on the Chinese language, this volume also offers a significant sample of the literature originally published in Chinese.

1	Introduction

This book proposes that unique linguistic properties of the Chinese language, particularly its orthography, have implications for cognitive processing, but not in the conventional sense of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity (see Hoosain, 1986a; O. J. L. Tzeng & Hung, 1981). In the original hypothesis, it was suggested that language influences thought, and in such a way that the use of different languages can lead to different conceptualizations or thought structures. Also, attention to language differences was focused on vocabulary or grammatical structure. One example of the effect of language structure on thought was that the Hopi Indian’s notion of time was different from that of the Westerner, since among other things the language did not have the three-tense system of Standard Average European (Whorf, 1956). Some ideas, such as that of absolute simultaneity, were supposed to be very difficult or impossible for the Hopi and had to be replaced by operational concepts. In this manner, conceptualizations or world views of different peoples were said to differ as a result of linguistic differences.

Introductory books on the linguistic relativity hypothesis usually refer to the many Eskimo words for snow, the various Arab words for camels, or the many words for types of rice in Southeast Asian languages, and dwell on the possible effects the words have on the ability of the respective language speakers to perceive the corresponding physical differences. We might note that in classical Chinese, there were a dozen distinct characters for varieties of cattle, although most of them are no longer used in modern Chinese (Ma, 1970). These included, for example, a separate character for a cow with a very long back, all in one morpheme. One could therefore speculate on the propensity of the earlier Chinese to be able to see the bovine distinctions depicted by the richer vocabulary. It does not have to be physical attributes either—perhaps abstract concepts are more interesting. Thus, social psychologists might wish to look at the implications of the absence of a concept corresponding to privacy in Chinese usage.

However, particularly with the work of Berlin and Kay (1969) and Rosch (1974) on basic color terms, people are more disinclined to think that language determines perception or thought, in the strong sense of linguistic determinism. Diverse languages all over the world show an orderly sequence of expansion of the vocabulary for basic color terms. Furthermore, whether a language has the full complement of 11 basic color terms like English or only 2 like Dani, the respective native speakers have been shown to perceive and remember color variations similarly¹. Kay and Kempton (1984) demonstrated, in a study comparing English and Tarahumara (a Uto-Aztecan language of northern Mexico), that a color discrimination difference, based on the lack of a basic lexical distinction of “green” and “blue” in Tarahumara, disappeared when the strategy of using lexical labels was blocked. It could be that the way human beings come to see and encode colors has a physiological basis (Hurvich & Jameson, 1974; MacNichol, 1964), and so we would be less likely to find language effects on the cognition of color (Kay & McDaniel, 1978). In any case, it seems reasonable to accept that language provisions can direct a speaker’s attention to certain physical or abstract attributes, and in this manner function to facilitate certain perceptions, but not necessarily “fully determine” them.

There has been some recent interest on an aspect of Chinese language structure and the effects it might have on thought processes. Bloom (1981) pointed out that Chinese does not have the subjunctive construction which acts as a marker for the counterfactual conditional in English (e.g., If the government were to pass a law, then …). Bloom had the impression that the Chinese found it difficult “to reason about things that they knew could not be the case” (p. 13). He hypothesized that the absence of the subjunctive structure predisposes the Chinese not to appreciate counterfactual import. His studies in Taiwan and Hong Kong, compared with those in the United States, appeared to support this hypothesis. When presented with sentences of the form “X was not the case, but if X was, then Y, then Z, etc.,” Chinese subjects were reported to be less able to realize that the consequents were considerations of what might have been but wasn’t. However, subsequent findings are inconsistent with Bloom’s conclusions. The subjunctive was shown to be not necessary for counterfactual thought (Au, 1984). Rather, developmental factors were significant (L. G. Liu, 1985). Apart from empirical verification, one could perhaps note that Chinese does not need a subjunctive construction mirroring that of English to express a counter-factual thought. Chao (1955) noted a popular expression in Chinese that could embody this spirit, namely, “If p is true, my name is not Wang” (with the name of the speaker being Wang, of course).

These examples demonstrate how vocabulary and language structure could possibly influence the way we perceive or think about things. In this book though, we concentrate more on the orthography of the Chinese language and its cognitive implications. The influence of orthography on cognition, particularly the influence of the manner in which the script represents sound and meaning, was not originally recognized in the work of Sapir and Whorf. In his discussion of the interaction between language and cultural experience, Sapir stated that, “It is the constant interplay between language and experience which removes language from the cold status of such purely and simply symbolic systems as mathematical symbolism or flag signaling” (Mandelbaum, 1951, p. 11). But the history of mathematics has amply demonstrated that cold symbolism, just as much as culture- embedded language, influences cognitive processes. We only have to contrast the ease of calculating with Arabic numerals instead of Roman numerals or the use of the Leibnitz’s notations for calculus instead of Newton’s (see O. J. L. Tzeng & Hung, 1981). The important point to note is that the effects of orthography or symbol systems are more in terms of the manner or facility with which information is processed, rather than different categorizations of information, such as relating to time, snow, or counterfactual conditional.

The psycholinguistic implications of the Chinese orthography examined in this book are more in terms of the facility with which language users process information, and the manner of information processing. No categorically different perceptions need result from such language distinctions. It has been suggested that such language effects matter more in data-driven or bottom-up processes rather than in conceptually driven or top-down processes (Hung & Tzeng, 1981). The former are initiated and largely determined by sensory information, but the latter are dominated by experience and knowledge of possible interpretations of the sensory information (Lindsay & Norman, 1977). For example, in reading, factors like size and clarity of the print affect bottom-up processes, but command of the language and the subject matter affects top-down processes. In any given situation, the two types of processes interact to eventually determine perception. Thus, whereas all those who can read will be able to read what is printed clearly, good readers are more able to read bad handwriting. For them, top-down processes compensate for the degraded or ambiguous sensory information. We shall see if the effects of the Chinese orthography are mainly confined to bottom-up processes.

We review Chinese studies in the three areas of perception, memory, and neurolinguistics to see how language or orthography differences could affect the manner in which we process information. Before that, we review linguistic aspects of Chinese that have some bearing on cognitive processes. In this book, we are more concerned with the written language. We are also more often concerned with the comprehension rather than the production of language, that is, reading more than writing.

Two sets of notes are used in this book. Those indicated by superscripts are ordinary footnotes for each chapter. Those indicated within brackets [ ] refer to illustrations with Chinese characters listed in the Appendix.

¹ It might be noted that Chinese has only 10 basic color terms. The equivalent for pink (a basic English color term) is made up of two characters or morphemes and translates as ‘powder red’, which therefore is not a basic color term.

2	Aspects of the Chinese Language

A unit of written Chinese is the character, and the distinctiveness of a character lies in its being simultaneously a visual whole, a syllabic unit, and the unit of meaning. This script-sound-meaning convergence provides the character with a salience and versatility that is absent in units of other languages, even though a character is not quite a word. Chinese characters are labeled variously as pictographs, ideographs, or logographs. These labels are sometimes applied inappropriately, and a clarification would help our understanding of the orthography. Acquaintance with the manner in which characters are used to make up words and larger linguistic units would also be useful in appreciating the cognitive implications of the language.

2.1 Script

To start with, Chinese characters are made up of configurations of eight major types of strokes, each with a label of its own [1]. Finer discrimination can produce about 20 distinct strokes (see W. S.-Y. Wang, 1973). The number of strokes in a character can vary from 1 to well over 20. In the simplified script adopted on the mainland after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China–as distinct from the traditional script used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other overseas communities–the number of strokes is often significantly smaller (see Table 2.1).

Table 2.1

Examples of Simplification of Traditional Characters

Adapted from So (1979).

The average number of strokes of the 14 most frequently occurring characters written in the traditional script, according to a corpus of more than a million characters surveyed by C. M. Cheng (1982), is 6.5. In a corpus of simplified script of more than 50,000 characters, with 3,317 different characters identified, M. Y. Chan (1982) found that the 14 characters with the highest frequency of occurrence had an average of 5.6 strokes. Also, the average stroke number of 2,000 commonly used characters was reduced from 11.2 to 9.0. There is an inverse relationship between frequency of usage and number of strokes in characters (M. Y. Chan, 1982). This would correspond to a similar relationship between frequency and word length in alphabetic languages, and both can be taken as indication of the principle of least effort expounded by Zipf (1949). At the level of sensory integration, it is the character that is the unit, constituting sensory wholes in the Gestalt sense. This sensory closure is achieved by the configuration and proximity of component strokes to each other, and the segregation of these strokes from those of other characters. The constituents of each character have a common fate, coming and going together as wholes, and meeting the requirement for sensory integration as a closure mechanism (Osgood & Hoosain, 1974).

Component strokes of characters are formed within a more or less square space allocated to each character, and they are usually written in the order of left to right as well as from top down. Stroke sequence is prescribed by convention (which has probably evolved according to psycho-motor principles), and correct stroke sequence is emphasized in learning to write.

Traditionally, characters are written in vertical columns from top down, and columns proceed from right to left. However, in modern times, particularly with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, texts are written or printed horizontally, with characters proceeding from left to right. In the case of shorter sequences of only a few characters, such as headlines and logos, characters can also be written horizontally in the order of right to left. This flexibility in direction-of-character sequence can result in the phenomenon that, in some newspapers in Hong Kong for example, lines of characters are printed in all three directions on the same page, with each direction marking a different article or headline.

2.2 Sound

Nearly all characters are pronounced monosyllabically in Chinese. But a small number sometimes can be pronounced subsyllabically. A frequently used one is the character [2], pronounced as /-r/ in Putonghua (the Mandarin dialect),¹ which is attached to other nouns to indicate the diminutive or as a form of endearment, although it can also be pronounced as /er/, a full syllable, to mean ‘son’. R. L. Cheng (1985) reviewed subsyllabic units in the Taiwanese dialect and was able to suggest some generalizations. For example, the negative marker is often realized as a voiced bilabial nasal initial rather than as a full syllable. These are considered historically to be reductions of full syllables.

In view of the predominance of the syllable in Chinese, we might note that although there are smaller sound units in linguistic analysis, notably the phoneme (the smallest unit of sound that makes a difference to meaning), there is evidence that human awareness of phonemes is not as good as awareness of syllables (e.g., Bryant & Bradley, 1985). This is particularly so in the case of children. There is also evidence that segmentation of speech sounds within the syllable is not a native human ability (Read, Zhang, Nie, & Ding, 1986).

Parallel to the segments of the syllable are the suprasegmental features of tones. These features are not lined up in sequence with phonemes but are superimposed on them. In Chinese, tonal difference affects meaning just as change in consonants and vowels does. There are four tones in Putonghua although other dialects may have more. The Cantonese dialect, spoken in Hong Kong, Guangzhou (Canton), and elsewhere, for example, is generally taken to have nine tones, exploring the upper and lower registers more fully. Of the six tonal variations of /ji/ in Cantonese [3], the high level tone means ‘clothing’, the high rising tone means ‘chair’, the mid level tone means ‘meaning’, the low falling tone means ‘child’, the low rising tone means ‘ear’, and the low level tone means ‘two’ (Ching, 1988).

There are supposed to be nearly 420 different syllables in Chinese. In his survey of a corpus of more than a million characters, C. M. Cheng (1982) identified 401 syllables. With these 400-odd syllables, the permutation of tonal variation in Putonghua in effect results in more than a thousand different pronunciations, with some syllables not realizing all the tonal permutations. This number is to correspond with tens of thousands of characters. Naturally, homophones abound. C. M. Cheng (1982) found that the 12 highest frequency syllables and their tonal variations made up 25% of the distribution of sounds in his corpus of characters, and the 45 highest frequency syllables made up 50%.

As changing the tone of syllables alters meaning as much as changing a consonant or a vowel, it makes sense to ask which variation is more noticeable to the native speaker. There seems to be agreement that tones are acquired earlier than segmentals in young children, both for Mandarin (C. N. Li & Thompson, 1977) and Cantonese (Tse, 1978). However, Tsang and Hoosain (1979) found that with adult Cantonese speakers in an auditory task, differences in segmental phonemes were easier to discriminate than differences in tones. Tonal variations are signaled primarily by pitch variation. A lipreader would not be able to discriminate characters differing in tones (see Ching, 1988).

2.3 Pictographs and Ideographs

A small percentage of characters convey meaning by pictographic representation, either iconic or abstract. The former are more direct, such as the character for bird (see Fig. 2.1). Whereas these pictographic characters have an etymology related to pictures, this relation is unlikely to have psychological reality in present day usage. It is not possible for the uninitiated Chinese reader or indeed the nonreader of Chinese to discern or guess at the meaning of such symbols. The confusion between having a pictographic etymology and having psychologically real pictographic function can lead to misunderstanding (see subsection 5.1.4).

Fig. 2.1. Derivation of the pictograph meaning ‘bird’. The character for bird, second from the right, is derived from earlier versions on the left of varying likeness to the object depicted. The character on the right is the simplified form used in the People’s Republic of China.

Some representations are more abstract rather than iconic. An example would be the character meaning a wood [4], made up of a repetition of the pictograph for tree (an iconic representation of a wood would require many more trees). Such characters need n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Aspects of the Chinese Language
• 3. Perceptual Aspects of the Chinese Language
• 4. Memory Aspects of the Chinese Language
• 5. Neurolinguistic Aspects of the Chinese Language
• 6. Conclusion
• Appendix
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index