Different Languages, Same Sun, and Same Grass: Do Linguistic Stimuli Influence Attention Shifts in Russian?

The aim of the current study is to test the hypothesis of Dudschig et al. (2012) for native Russian speakers. That hypothesis states that linguistic stimuli, which do not convey spatial information in their meaning (e.g., ‘sun’, ‘grass’), produce vertical attention shifts in the direction to the typical location of the word referent in the world. This effect was found by using English and German stimuli for English and German speakers, respectively. But the question is whether or not this effect is culturally specific, or whether there is a common cognitive basis. Three experiments were conducted in Russian, each using a different type of task in order to investigate (1) whether the effect expresses itself in the same way as for English and German, and (2) whether the type of task also influences the effects produced by the described stimuli. The effect of the original hypothesis was not observed, but there is a significant difference between reaction time to up- and down-stimuli: up-words (e.g. sun) were processed faster than down-words (e.g. grass). This indicates that original effect is both universal and has some cultural variability. A possible explanation of this variability is the cultural specificity of the stimuli themselves: the number of meanings, connotations, symbolic meanings, etc. This study may have a practical application in the sphere of foreign language teaching and cross-cultural communication, because it is important to understand that languages may differ not only by their structure, vocabulary, etc., but also by their way of embodiment and by spatial associations of different words; and it is also important to use this new knowledge to develop appropriate teaching methods and communication support.