ความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างประเภทไวยากรณ์ของคำนามกับระบบปริชานของผู้พูดภาษาไทยและภาษาอังกฤษ / จรัลวิไล จรูญโรจน์ = The relationship between nominal grammatical categories and the cognitive system of Thai Englishand / Jaralvilai Charoonrojn
To verify the linguistic relativity hypothesis through an analysis of the relationship between three grammatical categories; namely, number, countability, and classifier, and the cognitive system of Thai and English speakers. The relationship is inferred from the behavioral demonstration of their attention, memory, and classification of objects in three experiments. The subjects consist of 30 native speakers of Thai and 30 native speakers of English. In the first experiment on attention. They were asked to look at six pictures and verbally describe what they saw in the pictures. In the second experiment on memory, they were asked to answer questions about what they had seen in the pictures used in the first experiment. The third experiment on object classification involved grouping objects into sets. Three hypotheses are set for these experiments. The first hypothesis is that English subjects tend to pay greater attention to numbers, have a better retention of numbers and base their criteria of object classification more on numbers than Thai subjects. The result of the first experiment supports this first hypothesis. English subjects pay more attention to numbers (14% better), memorize numbers better (by 10.34%) and base their identification of objects on numbers (3.33% more). The second hypothesis is that English subjects typically pay more attention to and memorize the numbers of discrete objects better than the numbers of non-discrete objects, while Thai subjects tend not to exhibit such attention and retention behavior. Also, it is hypothesized that English speakers typically classify objects on the basis of substance more than Thai speakers do. The result partly supports the second hypothesis. Compared to Thai subjects, English subjects show 13.69% greater difference between attention to the numbers of discrete objects and attention to the numbers of non-discrete objects and 21.67% greater difference between the memory about numbers of those two kinds of entity. However, both groups of subjects showed no statistically significant difference in classifying objects on the basis of substance. The third hypothesis is that Thai subjects pay more attention to shape, memorize better about shape, and classify objects more on the basis of shape than English subjects. The result does not support this hypothesis. There is no statistically significant difference in the attention to and the memory about shape between the two groups. Rather, the English subjects can remember 8.7% more about shape than the Thai subjects can. It can be concluded that speakers' behavioral patterns, which reflect their cognitive systems, correspond to patterns in the language they speak, as evidenced in the first experiment, which shows that speakers of English, which is the language with grammatical number, pay more attention to numbers, memorize numbers better, and classify object more no the basis of numbers than do the speakers of a language without number. This shows that grammatical categories in a language can influence its speakers' cognitive system though for grammatical categories such as countability and classifiers, the evidence is not so clear cut.
