ABSTRACT

We present an experimental investigation of the influence of language on spatial memory. German and English differ in how they encode the axial position (standing vs. lying) of an inanimate figure object which is supported by a ground object. In a series of four experiments, we show that German and English speakers’ ability to detect changes in axial position during recognition memory tasks is unaffected by this linguistic difference. Even when participants are required to use language to encode the spatial scenes, later recognition memory performance does not differ between the two language groups. We discuss implications of these findings for the relation between language and cognition.

摘要

我们目前对语言对空间记忆的影响进行实验研究。德语和英语的区别在于如何编码由地面物体支撑的无生命人物物体的轴向位置（站立或躺着）。在一系列的四个实验中，我们表明德语和英语使用者在识别记忆任务期间检测轴向位置变化的能力不受此语言差异的影响。即使要求参与者使用语言对空间场景进行编码，两个语言组之间的稍后识别记忆性能也不会有所不同。我们讨论了这些发现对语言与认知之间关系的影响。