Does language rule perception? Testing a radical view of linguistic relativity.

To investigate whether language rules the visual features that can be discriminated (a radical assumption of linguistic relativity), we examined crosslinguistic differences between native Korean and German speakers during liminal perception of a target disk that was difficult to perceive because its visibility suffered from masking by a ring that followed and enclosed the target disk (metacontrast-masking). Target-mask fit varied, with half of the masks tightly and the other half loosely encircling the targets. In Korean, such tight versus loose spatial relations are semantically distinguished and thus highly practiced, whereas in German, they are collapsed within a single semantic category, thus are not distinguished by language. We expected higher sensitivity and greater attention to varying spatial target-mask distances in Korean than in German speakers. This was confirmed in Experiment 1, where Korean speakers consistently outperformed German speakers in discriminating liminal metacontrast-masked stimuli. To ensure that this effect was not attributable to generic differences in attention capture or by language-independent differences between participant groups, we investigated stimulus-driven attention capture by color singletons and conducted a control experiment using object-substitution masking, where tightness of fit was not manipulated. We found no differences between Korean and German speakers regarding stimulus-driven attention capture or perceptual sensitivity. This was confirmed in Experiment 3, where we manipulated types of masking within participants. In addition, we validated the tightness-of-fit manipulation in a language-related task (Experiment 4). Overall, our results are consistent with linguistic relativity, namely its assumed generalized language influences in nonlinguistic perceptual tasks. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Linguistic Skill and Stimulus-Driven Attention: A Case for Linguistic Relativity.

How does the language we speak affect our perception? Here, we argue for linguistic relativity and present an explanation through "language-induced automatized stimulus-driven attention" (LASA): Our respective mother tongue automatically influences our attention and, hence, perception, and in this sense determines what we see. As LASA is highly practiced throughout life, it is difficult to suppress, and even shows in language-independent non-linguistic tasks. We argue that attention is involved in language-dependent processing and point out that automatic or stimulus-driven forms of attention, albeit initially learned as serving a linguistic skill, account for linguistic relativity as they are automatized and generalize to non-linguistic tasks. In support of this possibility, we review evidence for such automatized stimulus-driven attention in language-independent non-linguistic tasks. We conclude that linguistic relativity is possible and in fact a reality, although it might not be as powerful as assumed by some of its strongest proponents.

Beyond the Two-Clause Sentence: Acquisition of Clause Chaining in Six Languages.

Clause chains are a special type of complex sentence, found in hundreds of languages outside Western Europe, in which clauses are dependent but not embedded, and dozens of clauses can be combined into a single sentential unit. Unlike English complex sentences, clause chains' distribution is partially predictable in that they can, most fundamentally, be linked to a particular semantic context: description of temporally sequential events or actions. This and the morphological simplicity of verb forms in clause chains may combine to accelerate their acquisition by children, relative to complex sentences in other languages. No previous cross-linguistic studies of the acquisition of complex sentences have investigated clause chaining. In this paper, we report insights from a survey of the acquisition of clause chaining in six languages of diverse stocks with child speech databases spanning 1;1 to 10 years. Overall, children acquiring clause chaining languages begin to produce 2-clause chains between around 1;11 and 2;6. An initial stage in which chains are limited to just two clauses in length is followed by a stage in which longer chains of 3-5 clauses are also produced. Children acquiring languages in which adults produce both same-subject and different-subject clause chains produce a similar mix from early on; for some languages, this involves morphological "switch-reference" marking that anticipates the identity of the subject of an upcoming clause. This survey broadens our understanding of the acquisition of complex sentences by adding new data on the acquisition timing, semantics, and reference continuity of early clause chains.

Development of Clause Chaining in Korean.

Korean is a language with the verb at the end of a clause/sentence. In chaining several clauses [each consisting of a subject and a verb] in a sentence, a conjunction (e.g., -ko "and then," -ese "because, and so") is suffixed to the verb of a non-final clause. Korean has an extensive set of conjunctions that connect to the next clause, expressing temporal, causal, and contrastive relations among others. In this paper, I lay out a developmental trajectory of clause chaining construction in Korean based on longitudinal and cross-sectional data samples, focusing on conjunctive forms and functions as well as morphological and syntactic properties of connected clauses in a sentence. The database comes from longitudinal naturalistic speech data of five children collected regularly over different time periods between 2 and 5 years of age, and from elicited descriptions of short video events from children - aged 3, 4, 6, 8, and 10 years - and adults. The results show that, at least from 2 years of age, the Korean children in the sample start connecting clauses using appropriate conjunctions. Within 6 months, they acquire several major conjunctions that express temporal, causal, conditional, and contrastive relations between events. By 4 years of age, the children's clause chains are quite adult-like in terms of the repertoire of conjunctive forms and functions, and of the morphological and syntactic features of the clauses that connect to the main clause. In particular they learn to express temporal relations that have some disjuncture between events. However, 4-year-olds still lack the ability to appropriately refer to differential subjects of the chained clauses and also to connect multiple clauses in a sentence. The elicitation data reveal that further development in clause chaining occurs over several years - with a milestone at 10 years - and through adulthood, particularly in relation to appropriate referential marking, conjunction frequency, and segmentation of a macro event into sub-events for clause-chaining construction. These developmental processes are presented from a cognitive perspective, in particular with regard to concept of temporal relation, reference specification involving two or more entities, and perceptual saliency of event type.

Whereof one cannot speak: How language and capture of visual attention interact.

Our research addresses the important question whether language influences cognition by studying crosslinguistic differences in nonlinguistic visual search tasks. We investigated whether capture of visual attention is mediated by characteristics corresponding to concepts that are differently expressed across different languages. Korean grammatically distinguishes between tight- (kkita) and loose-fit (nehta) containment whereas German collapses them into a single semantic category (in). Although linguistic processing was neither instructed nor necessary to perform the visual search task, we found that Korean speakers showed attention capture by non-instructed but target-coincident (Experiment 1) or distractor-coincident (Experiments 4 and 5) spatial fitness of the stimuli, whereas German speakers were not sensitive to it. As the tight- versus loose-fit distinction is grammaticalized only in the Korean but not the German language, our results demonstrate that language influences which visual features capture attention even in non-linguistic tasks that do not require paying attention to these features. In separate control experiments (Experiments 2 and 3), we ruled out cultural or general cognitive group differences between Korean and German speaking participants as alternative explanations. We outline the mechanisms underlying these crosslinguistic differences in nonlinguistic visual search behaviors. This is the first study showing that linguistic spatial relational concepts held in long-term memory can affect attention capture in visual search tasks.

Spatial Semantics, Cognition, and Their Interaction: A Comparative Study of Spatial Categorization in English and Korean.

This study has two goals. First, we present much-needed empirical linguistic data and systematic analyses on the spatial semantic systems in English and Korean, two languages that have been extensively compared to date in the debate on spatial language and spatial cognition. We conduct our linguistic investigation comprehensively, encompassing the domains of tight- and loose-fit as well as containment and support relations. The current analysis reveals both cross-linguistic commonalities and differences: From a common set of spatial features, each language highlights a subset of those features for its principal categorization, and those primary features are importantly different between English and Korean: English speakers categorize events predominantly by containment and support relations (and do so with prepositions), whereas Korean speakers categorize them by tight-fit and loose-fit relations (and do so with verbs), with a further distinction of containment and support within the loose-fit relation. The analysis also shows that the tight-fit domain is more cross-linguistically diverse in categorization than is the loose-fit domain. Second, we test the language data against the nonlinguistic categorization results reported in Choi and Hattrup (2012). The results show a remarkable degree of convergence between the patterns predicted from the current linguistic analysis and those found in C&H's nonlinguistic study and thus provide empirical and strong evidence for an influence of language on nonlinguistic spatial cognition. At the same time, the study reveals areas where the two systems closely interact with each other as well as those where one is independent from the other. Taking both parts of the study together, we identify the specific roles that language and spatial perception/cognition play in spatial categorization.

Effects of Language Background on Gaze Behavior: A Crosslinguistic Comparison Between Korean and German Speakers.

Languages differ in how they categorize spatial relations: While German differentiates between containment (in) and support (auf) with distinct spatial words-(a) den Kuli IN die Kappe stecken ("put pen in cap"); (b) die Kappe AUF den Kuli stecken ("put cap on pen")-Korean uses a single spatial word (kkita) collapsing (a) and (b) into one semantic category, particularly when the spatial enclosure is tight-fit. Korean uses a different word (i.e., netha) for loose-fits (e.g., apple in bowl). We tested whether these differences influence the attention of the speaker. In a crosslinguistic study, we compared native German speakers with native Korean speakers. Participants rated the similarity of two successive video clips of several scenes where two objects were joined or nested (either in a tight or loose manner). The rating data show that Korean speakers base their rating of similarity more on tight- versus loose-fit, whereas German speakers base their rating more on containment versus support (in vs. auf). Throughout the experiment, we also measured the participants' eye movements. Korean speakers looked equally long at the moving Figure object and at the stationary Ground object, whereas German speakers were more biased to look at the Ground object. Additionally, Korean speakers also looked more at the region where the two objects touched than did German speakers. We discuss our data in the light of crosslinguistic semantics and the extent of their influence on spatial cognition and perception.

How children perceive fractals: hierarchical self-similarity and cognitive development.

The ability to understand and generate hierarchical structures is a crucial component of human cognition, available in language, music, mathematics and problem solving. Recursion is a particularly useful mechanism for generating complex hierarchies by means of self-embedding rules. In the visual domain, fractals are recursive structures in which simple transformation rules generate hierarchies of infinite depth. Research on how children acquire these rules can provide valuable insight into the cognitive requirements and learning constraints of recursion. Here, we used fractals to investigate the acquisition of recursion in the visual domain, and probed for correlations with grammar comprehension and general intelligence. We compared second (n=26) and fourth graders (n=26) in their ability to represent two types of rules for generating hierarchical structures: Recursive rules, on the one hand, which generate new hierarchical levels; and iterative rules, on the other hand, which merely insert items within hierarchies without generating new levels. We found that the majority of fourth graders, but not second graders, were able to represent both recursive and iterative rules. This difference was partially accounted by second graders' impairment in detecting hierarchical mistakes, and correlated with between-grade differences in grammar comprehension tasks. Empirically, recursion and iteration also differed in at least one crucial aspect: While the ability to learn recursive rules seemed to depend on the previous acquisition of simple iterative representations, the opposite was not true, i.e., children were able to acquire iterative rules before they acquired recursive representations. These results suggest that the acquisition of recursion in vision follows learning constraints similar to the acquisition of recursion in language, and that both domains share cognitive resources involved in hierarchical processing.

Relative contribution of perception/cognition and language on spatial categorization.

This study investigated the relative contribution of perception/cognition and language-specific semantics in nonverbal categorization of spatial relations. English and Korean speakers completed a video-based similarity judgment task involving containment, support, tight fit, and loose fit. Both perception/cognition and language served as resources for categorization, and allocation between the two depended on the target relation and the features contrasted in the choices. Whereas perceptual/cognitive salience for containment and tight-fit features guided categorization in many contexts, language-specific semantics influenced categorization where the two features competed for similarity judgment and when the target relation was tight support, a domain where spatial relations are perceptually diverse. In the latter contexts, each group categorized more in line with semantics of their language, that is, containment/support for English and tight/loose fit for Korean. We conclude that language guides spatial categorization when perception/cognition alone is not sufficient. In this way, language is an integral part of our cognitive domain of space.

Waist circumference and waist-to-height ratio as predictors of cardiovascular disease risk in Korean adults.

BACKGROUND: Obesity is associated with diabetes mellitus, hypertension, dyslipidemia and increased cardiovascular disease (CVD) risk. Anthropometric indices, such body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR), were evaluated as predictors of the presence of CVD risk factors in Korean adults. METHODS AND RESULTS: The data were obtained from the Third Korea National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (KNHANES III, 2005). The study contained a nationally representative sample of Korean adults (2,327 men, 3,102 women) aged 20 years or older. The area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve for WHtR was higher than that for WC or BMI with respect to diabetes mellitus and hypertension in both men and women, whereas WC was a better predictor for low high-density lipoprotein cholesterol in men. The WHtR cut-off value to predict diabetes mellitus, hypertension, and dyslipidemia was approximately 0.50 in men and 0.51 in women. The WC cut-offs varied from 81.6 to 85.2 cm in men and from 78.1 to 81.9 cm in women. The optimal BMI cut-off point varied from 23.0 to 24.7 kg/m(2) in both men and women. CONCLUSIONS: WC or WHtR may be a better predictor of CVD risk factors than BMI in Korean adults.

Understanding spatial relations: flexible infants, lexical adults.

Concepts of containment, support, and degree of fit were investigated using nonverbal, preferential-looking tasks with 9- to 14-month-old infants and adults who were fluent in either English or Korean. Two contrasts were tested: tight containment vs. loose support (grammaticized as 'in' and 'on' in English by spatial prepositions and 'kkita' and 'nohta' in Korean by spatial verbs) and tight containment vs. loose containment (both grammaticized as 'in' in English but separately as 'kkita' and 'nehta' in Korean). Infants categorized both contrasts, suggesting conceptual readiness for learning such spatial semantics in either language. English-speaking adults categorized tight containment vs. loose support, but not tight vs. loose containment. However, Korean-speaking adults were successful at this latter contrast, which is lexicalized in their language. The adult data suggest that some spatial relations that are salient during the preverbal stage become less salient if language does not systematically encode them.