Cognitive Differences between Different Oriental Cultures: The Case of the Taiwanese and the Japanese

• Main Author: 鄭涵倩
• Other Authors: 陳振宇
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/02505311266193308695

碩士 === 國立臺灣師範大學 === 華語文教學系 === 102 === In his book “The Geography of Thought”, Nisbett pointed out that the East and the West have developed different cultures due to the influence of geography on living habits, and thus subsequently created differences in the recognition of events and objects. He believes that the Eastern culture lean towards group life, and so it emphasizes on harmony and group in terms of recognition and the background of events and location. On the other hand, Western people believe in individualism which praises personal characteristics and the pursuit of personal future, and so they emphasize uniqueness and foreground objects. Therefore, easterner’s way of thinking lean towards comprehensive subjective thinking, whereas westerners have a more objective analytical way of thinking that systematically sort events and objects by categories or properties. Nisbett backed up his theory by using daily examples. For instance, on a same case, easterners uses the surrounding life and others as factors and reasoning for analyzing the main character, but westerners focus more on the main character’s characteristics and properties for reasoning. In light of Nisbett’s theory of cultural differences lead to differences in recognition, this research continued to use this model of thinking on the comparison of Japan and Taiwan in order to show whether the significant cultural differences of the two eastern cultures also lead to differences in recognition. This research uses “uniqueness” versus “harmony” and visual “foreground” versus “background” detections to discuss whether the Japanese harmonic group culture and the diversity of Taiwanese can also create differences in recognition. The current research discovered that, if were asked to choose a pattern from a picture consisting a small number of pattern existing in a majority of another pattern, Japanese tend to choose the pattern of the majority, whereas Taiwanese chooses the rarer one. In terms of preference ranking, Taiwanese are more likely to give a higher ranking to the more unique pattern. In pictures or videos of people and animal in the foreground with buildings and settings in the background, Japanese span its attention to the background and overall setting more than Taiwanese. Combining the experimental results, this research discovered that Japanese emphasizes on the background environmental factors more than Taiwanese. Applying this finding to Mandarin education, materials designed for Japanese learners can be categorized by topics or have clear separation between chapters in order to avoid lost of focus for Japanese learners. In the process of teaching, board writing should align with the order of teaching. Teacher should remind its students the main concept or key point of a chapter more often and encourages Japanese learners to speak-up or express personal opinions to increase the efficiency of learning foreign languages for Japanese learners.