Doctoral Dissertation Research: Spatial Language and Cognition in Bilingual Minds

人们如何概念化和描述空间？他们可以从各种策略中选择来描绘物体的位置，例如使用太阳升起/落下的方向，将自己的身体轴投影到物体上，或引入另一个物体作为地标。这些描述提供了一个机会，探讨人们如何思考和谈论空间作为一种文化实践之间共享的言语社区的成员。语言学家和心理学家对影响此类策略选择的因素特别感兴趣。语言、文化因素（如教育和识字）以及环境变量（如地形和人口地理）都被假设在这一过程中发挥潜在作用。在这方面，一个关键但研究不足的问题是双语的影响。如果一个人说的语言影响了他们对空间的认知，那么说多种语言的人可能会以不同于单语者的方式思考。这种假设的效果提供了一个机会，以获得丰富和详细的信息，语言在认知中的作用。本研究以台湾地区为研究对象，探讨语言、文化与环境对单语与双语使用者在语言与认知上空间表征的影响。由于其移民历史，台湾可以被认为是一个自然的语言实验室，在年龄，教育和居住社区方面，双语者之间存在很大的差异。测试语言，普通话和台湾南部闽南语，一个遥远的堂兄弟的普通话，表现出非常不同的功能和实践中使用的空间参考。该项目将记录这些语言的单语和双语使用者对空间描述的使用，并研究第一和第二语言、教育、识字和环境对空间认知的影响

How do people conceptualize and describe space? They can choose from a variety of strategies to delineate the location of an object, using for instance the directions where the sun rises/sets, projecting their own body axes onto the object, or introducing another object as landmark. These descriptions provide an opportunity to probe into the way people think and talk about space as a cultural practice shared among the members of a speech community. Linguists and psychologists are particularly interested in the factors that influence the selection among such strategies. Language, cultural factors such as education and literacy, and environmental variables such as topography and population geography have all been hypothesized to play a potential role in this process. A critical but understudied question in this connection is the impact of bilingualism. If the language a person speaks influences how they represent space cognitively, then speakers of multiple languages might think in ways that differ from how monolinguals think. Such hypothetical effects offer an opportunity to gain rich and detailed information about the role of language in cognition. This project focuses on Taiwan to explore the effect of language, culture and environment on the way monolingual and bilingual speakers represent space in language and cognition. Due to its migration history, Taiwan can be considered a natural linguistic laboratory with a great amount of variation among bilingual speakers in terms of age, education and residential neighborhoods. The test languages, Mandarin Chinese and Taiwanese Southern Min, a distant cousin of Mandarin, exhibit very distinct features and practices of use in spatial reference. The project will document the use of spatial descriptions by monolingual and bilingual speakers of these languages and study the impact of the first and second language, education, literacy, and the environment on spatial cognition