Doctoral Dissertation Research: Spatial Language and Cognition in Bilingual Minds

人们如何对空间进行概念化和描述？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，将他们自己的身体轴投影到物体上，或者引入另一个物体作为地标。这些描述提供了一个机会，来探讨人们如何思考和谈论空间，因为空间是语言社区成员之间共享的一种文化实践。语言学家和心理学家对影响这些策略选择的因素特别感兴趣。语言、教育和识字等文化因素以及地形和人口地理等环境变量都被假定在这一过程中发挥潜在作用。在这方面，一个关键但未得到充分研究的问题是双语的影响。如果一个人说的语言影响了他们在认知上表示空间的方式，那么说多种语言的人可能会以不同于只有一种语言的人的方式思考。这些假设的影响提供了一个机会，以获得关于语言在认知中的作用的丰富和详细的信息。本项目以台湾为研究对象，探讨语言、文化和环境对单语者和双语者在语言和认知中表现空间的影响。由于台湾的迁徙历史，可以说是一个天然的语言实验室，说双语的人在年龄、教育程度和居住环境上都有很大的差异。这两种测试语言--普通话和台湾闽南语--普通话的远亲，在空间参照方面表现出非常不同的特点和使用实践。该项目将记录使用这些语言的单语者和双语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