ABSTRACT
This chapter presents three experiments on the cognitive effects of Chinese classifiers for Chinese native speakers, English native speakers with various Chinese language learning experiences, and English native speakers with no Chinese language learning experience. Zhang and Schmitt utilized the Chinese classifier system to argue for a strong version of linguistic relativity. Their study consisted of a perceived similarity test on English and Chinese native speakers. The experiment on Chinese native-speaking participants was conducted in the office of a faculty member in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature at Tianjin Normal University in Tianjin, China. The chapter provides a language-group comparison among the three groups using the same picture-only classification task. In preparing the data for analysis, the chapter calculates the mean reaction time for each subject and eliminated all subjects whose mean reaction time on all test stimuli was more than 2.5 standard deviations (SD) from the mean.
