Does Language Matter? Exploring Chinese–Korean Differences in Holistic Perception

Abstract

Cross-cultural research suggests that East Asians display a holistic attentional bias by paying attention to the entire field and to relationships between objects, whereas Westerners pay attention primarily to salient objects, displaying an analytic attentional bias. The assumption of a universal pan-Asian holistic attentional bias has recently been challenged in experimental research involving Japanese and Chinese participants, which suggests that linguistic factors may contribute to the formation of East Asians' holistic attentional patterns. The present experimental research explores differences in attention and information processing styles between Korean and Chinese speakers, who have been assumed to display the same attentional bias due to cultural commonalities. We hypothesize that the specific structure of the Korean language predisposes speakers to pay more attention to ground information than to figure information, thus leading to a stronger holistic attentional bias compared to Chinese speakers. Findings of the present research comparing different groups of English, Chinese, and Korean speakers provide further evidence for differences in East Asians' holistic attentional bias, which may be due to the influence of language. Furthermore, we also extend prior theorizing by discussing the potential impact of other cultural factors. In line with critical voices calling for more research investigating differences between cultures that are assumed to be culturally similar, we highlight important avenues for future studies exploring the language-culture relationship.

Cultural differences in politeness as a function of status relations: Comparing South Korean and British communicators

“…One prevalent assumption in psychology has been that East Asian individuals are generally more polite in their communications due to cultural norms and values that prescribe being respectful toward others. This is generally consistent with research findings that communications in East Asian cultures are subject to stricter politeness conventions than in Western cultures (Rhode et al, ; Tajima & Duffield, ). However, this prior research did not consider if cross‐cultural differences emerge equally for communications with message recipients who occupy different ranks in the social hierarchy.…”

“…In contrast, low context communication styles that entail being more dramatic, open, and precise, are more likely to be found in European cultures compared with Asian cultures (Gudykunst, ; Park & Kim, ). Korean speakers also use more ground (contextual) information than do English speakers; skipping ground information can be considered as a violation of politeness conventions in the former cultural group (e.g., Rhode, Voyer, & Gleibs, ; Tajima & Duffield, ). Consequently, East‐Asian individuals are often perceived as modest, humble, face‐conscious, and indirect communicators (for a review see Stadler, ).…”

Does Grammatical Gender Influence Perception? A Study of Polish and French Speakers

“…Researchers have demonstrated the role of language in the perception of time (Boroditsky, 2000(Boroditsky, , 2001, colour (Thierry et al, 2009;Winawer et al, 2007), spatial cognition (Bowerman, Choi, McDonough, & Mandler, 1999;Gentner & Loftus, 1979;Landau & Jackendoff, 1993;Levinson, Kita, Haun, & Rasch, 2002;McDonough, Choi, & Mandler, 2003), the perception of motion (Athanasopoulos et al, 2015;Czechowska & Ewert, 2011), attention and information processing styles (Rhode, Voyer, & Gleibs, 2016), the perception and memory of events (Boroditsky, Ham, & Ramscar, 2002;Fausey & Boroditsky, 2010;Loftus & Palmer, 1974;Scholl & Nakayama, 2002), and even constructing agency, including attending to and remembering the agents of events (Choi, 2009;Fausey & Boroditsky, 2010a;Fausey & Boroditsky, 2011;Fausey, Long, Inamori, & Boroditsky, 2010).…”

The Impact of Non-Standard Work Arrangements and Communication Climate on Organisational and Team Identification and Work-Related Outcomes Amongst Millennials in Chile and the UK

“…Thus, one aim of our work is to examine whether the effects we found in Chile can be replicated in a different cultural context. This aim responds to calls for more replications (Earp & Trafimow, 2015;Rhode, Voyer, & Gleibs, 2016) and more inclusion and diversity (Kitayama, 2017), addressing the question of whether contextual factors (e.g., location, culture) are associated with reproducibility (Van Bavel, Mende-Siedlecki, Brady, & Reinero, 2016).…”