Author: Au, T.K.
Description: Bloom (1981) found that Chinese speakers were less likely than English speakers to give counterfactual interpretations to a counterfactual story. These findings, together with the presence of a distinct counterfactual marker (the subjunctive) in English, but not in Chinese, were interpreted as evidence for the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A series of five studies was designed to replicate these findings, using both Chinese and English versions of a new counterfactual story as well as the story used by Bloom. In these studies, bilingual Chinese showed little difficulty in understanding either story in either language, insofar as the English and Chinese were idiomatic. For one story, the Chinese bilinguals performed better in Chinese than American subjects did in English. Nearly monolingual Chinese who did not know the English subjunctive also gave mostly counterfactual responses. These findings suggest that the mastery of the English subjunctive is probably quite tangenital to counterfactual reasoning in Chinese. In short, the present research yielded no support for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Subject headings: Adolescent; Adult; Child; Cognition; Female; Humans; Language; Linguistics; Male; Thinking
Publication year: 1983
Journal or book title: Cognition
Volume: 15
Issue: 1-3
Pages: 155-187
Find the full text :Â https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027783900380
Find more like this one (cited by): https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=776056521044379214&as_sdt=1000005&sciodt=0,16&hl=en
Type: Journal Article
Serial number: 1719