The dimensional arrow: Agreement in directional mapping of dimensions among Mandarin Chinese- and English-speakers

Abstract

We present evidence that English- and Mandarin-speakers agree about how to map dimensions (e.g., size and clarity) to vertical space and that they do so in a directional way. We first developed visual stimuli for four dimensions—size, clarity, complexity, and darkness—and in each case we varied the stimuli to express a range of the dimension (e.g., there were five total items expressing the range covering big, medium, and small). In our study, English- and Mandarin-speakers mapped these stimuli to an unlabelled vertical scale. Most people mapped dimensional endpoints in similar ways; using size as a standard, we found that the majority of participants mapped the clearest, most complex, and darkest items to the same end of the vertical scale as they mapped the biggest items. This indicates that all four dimensions have a weighted or unmarked end (i.e., all are directional or polar). The strong similarities in polarity across language groups contrasted with group differences on a lexical task, for which there was little cross-linguistic agreement about which comparative words to use to describe stimulus pairs (e.g., “bigger” vs. “smaller”). Thus, we found no evidence in this study that the perception of these dimensions is influenced by language.

Keywords:

• Dimensions
• Language influence
• Cross-linguistic
• Polarity
• Cross-modal

Acknowledgments

This research was funded by an International Joint Project Award from the Royal Society to Merideth Gattis and Ovid Tzeng, by an award from the National Science Council, Taiwan, to Denise Wu (NSC 98-2410-H-008-012), and by a private donation to Ovid Tzeng, Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, Taiwan. We thank Jing-Jing Ding and Gruffydd Humphreys for their assistance with data collection, Shu-Jen Kung and Richard Bowers for helping to create stimuli, Frank Durgin for his advice, and Marc Buehner, Ulrich von Hecker, Charlotte Kemp, and Emma Bridger for their helpful comments on a draft of this paper.

Notes

¹ In a separate study, we tested 10 participants from each country to ensure that these stimuli were perceptually discriminable from each other when presented briefly (at the same rate as in this study). The overall median percent accuracy at distinguishing between two stimuli adjacent on the rating scale was 89% (English-speakers) and 95% (Chinese-speakers).