The current paper presents two experiments investigating the effect of presence versus absence of compulsory number marking in a native language on a speaker's ability to recall number information from photos. In Experiment 1, monolingual English and Japanese adults were shown a sequence of 110 photos after which they were asked questions about the photos. We found that the English participants showed a significantly higher accuracy rate for questions testing recall for number information when the correct answer was “2” (instead of “1”) than Japanese participants. In Experiment 2, English and Japanese adults engaged in the same task as in Experiment 1 with an addition that explored reasons for the results found in Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 2 were in line with the results of Experiment 1, but also suggested that the results could not be attributed to differences in guessing patterns between the two groups or the type of linguistic constructions used in the test situations. The current study suggests that native language affects speakers' ability to recall number information from scenes and thus provides evidence for the Whorfian hypothesis.

中文翻译：

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语言特定特征对英语和日语使用者回忆数字信息能力的影响

目前的论文提出了两个实验，研究在母语中是否存在强制性数字标记对说话者从照片中回忆数字信息的能力的影响。在实验 1 中，单语的英语和日语成年人被展示了一系列 110 张照片，之后他们被问及关于这些照片的问题。我们发现，当正确答案为“2”（而不是“1”）时，英语参与者在测试数字信息回忆的问题上表现出明显高于日本参与者的准确率。在实验 2 中，英国和日本成年人从事与实验 1 相同的任务，并增加了探索实验 1 中发现结果的原因。实验 2 的结果与实验 1 的结果一致，但也表明结果不能归因于两组之间的猜测模式或测试情况中使用的语言结构类型的差异。目前的研究表明，母语会影响说话者从场景中回忆数字信息的能力，从而为沃尔夫假说提供了证据。