人称代词对心理模拟视角的影响

The role of personal pronouns in perspective-taking in language comprehension

具身语言认知认为,当理解句子时,人们自动模拟语言描述的运动、感知和情感内容,并对被描述的动作和物体的感知信息进行心理表征。人们在语言理解中也会模拟动作或事件的视角信息。在阅读人称代词作主语的句子时,人们往往从内部视角或外部视角模拟句子描述的动作。本研究采用句图匹配范式,旨在探究在汉语句子理解过程中人称代词对视角模拟的影响。本研究实验句包括第二人称和第三人称主语两个版本,实验图片分别以内部视角(动作执行者的视角)和外部视角(旁观者的视角)呈现。实验一旨在考察汉语母语者在理解人称代词作主语的句子时是否会自动模拟事件的视角,实验二旨在探讨省略主语代词的汉语句子是否会促使读者在语言理解过程中采取特定的心理模拟视角。研究结果表明,在汉语句子理解过程中,汉语母语者对代词调节视角的心理模拟作用较小。

Based on embodied language cognition,language comprehension involves mental representations of described objects and its perceptual information.When readers process sentences,they construct simulations to represent its perceptual,motor,and affective contents.Perspectives of described events would be simulated during sentence comprehension.When comprehending sentences with personal pronouns as subjects,people tend to simulate the perspective of actions or events,either from an internal perspective or external perspective.The present study adopted sentence-picture verification paradigm,aiming to examine how personal pronouns modulate perspective-taking in language comprehension in the context of Chinese.In the present study,experimental sentences had two versions:sentences with the second-person pronoun or the third-person pronoun;experimental pictures were presented either from internal perspective or external perspective.The first experiment aimed to examine whether Chinese native speakers simulate the perspective of events automatically when comprehending Chinese sentences with explicit subjects.The second experiment aimed to find out whether readers adopt a specific perspective in null-subject sentence comprehension.The findings demonstrate that the influence of personal pronouns on perspective-taking during language comprehension is relatively weak,which is consistent with the moderate embodied language cognition theory.