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Transparency of first language calendar terms and its impact on calendrical calculations in the first and the second language
Date created: 2021-11-22 10:02 PM | Last Updated: 2024-10-04 12:25 AM
Identifier: DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/3H97T
Category: Project
Description: Calendar calculations, the process of computing the target day or month, exhibit peculiar differences across languages. In systems like English, calendar labels are largely opaque (Tuesday, August), which invites calculations to rely more heavily on verbal listing. In transparent systems, like Chinese, habitual labeling of calendar terms numerically (Tuesday = day two, August = month eight) facilitates fast numerical operations instead of verbal listing. This study examines the effects that different levels of transparency of the calendar naming system may have on calculations in the speakers’ first and second language. Chinese-English bilinguals were tested alongside English and Chinese controls. Forced-choice calendar calculations (day, month, hour, and year) and self-reported strategies were used as tasks to tap into participants’ calculation speed, accuracy, and temporal reasoning. In the calculation questions we manipulated Distance (short/long), Direction (forward/backward), Input (linguistic/numerical) and Boundary (within/across). More complex Month calculations significantly differed across groups while easier Day calculations did not. The English group reported reliance on verbal listing, while the Chinese and the bilingual groups preferred numerical reasoning. These findings bring new evidence for linguistic relativity in the form of modulations of calendar processing speed changing as a function of linguistic transparency, input type and task demand.
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Transparency of first language calendar terms and its impact on calendrical calculations in the first and the second language
| Registered: 2021-11-23 13:44 UTC
This study investigates the effects of transparency of first language calendar terms on the speed and accuracy of calendrical calculations performed b...
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