汉语句子层面心理模拟的更新机制研究

The updating mechanism of mental simulations across Chinese sentences

本研究复制了Mannaert,Dijkstra&Zwaan(2019)的行为实验,使用句图匹配范式研究了具有隐含形状信息汉语句子层面的心理模拟更新机制。被试阅读两组句子对,一组句子对隐含的物体形状发生变化,另一组句子对隐含的物体形状不发生变化。研究结果表明,在形状不变的条件下,匹配效应显著,形状与匹配之间交互作用显著;在形状改变的条件下,第一句话隐含的形状信息依然处于激活状态。这说明在语言理解过程中,隐含的物体形状信息被激活,同时心理模拟也得到了更新,通过初始模拟的物体形状与最终物体形状相结合来共同表征新获得的语言理解信息。这一结论符合本研究的预期,但与复制的实验结果不一致,可能原因是不同语言的母语者、语言类型特征和语法标记对心理模拟的更新机制存在一定的影响。

The current study replicates Mannaert, Dijkstra, and Zwaan’s classic behavioral experiment in 2019 and explores the updating mechanism of mental simulations across Chinese sentences with implicit shape information by the sentence-picture verification paradigm. In the experiment, participants read sentence pair in two blocks, the one is in the shape-changing condition, and the other is in the shape-constant condition. The results show that in the shape-constant condition, the match effect is significant, and there is a strong interaction between shape and match. The findings demonstrate that under the shape-change condition, the shape information implied by the first sentence remains activated rather than being deactivated or replaced by that of the second sentence, indicating that the implied shape information are activated and participants’ mental simulations are updated during the language comprehension, and the original simulated object shape is combined with the final object shape to represent the newly supplied language comprehension information,which verify our hypothesis. However, the results in this study are contrary to that in the original study by Mannaert, Dijkstra, and Zwaan. It is implied that the native speakers of different languages, different language typological features and grammatical markers have some influence on the updating mechanism of mental simulations during language comprehension.