ИСТИНА

Language and writing systems are important social practices associated with the development of specific features in cognitive activity. Preferences in cognitive patterns are associated with the language systems mastered previously. Thus, the grammar of Indo-European languages contributes to the idea of a world built of atomic blocks while Asian language systems tend to focus on the continuous nature of the world (Hansen, 1983). East Asian languages are characterized by high contextuality (Freeman & Habermann, 1996), whereas English-speakers teach their child to understand speech without context (Heath, 1982). There are several solid reasons to believe social and cognitive practices are mutually supportive (Nisbett, 2011). Plenty of research demonstrating that the use of two mental lexicons leads to the development of special cognitive skills appeared (Hermandes et al., 2001). It showed that writing system (alphabetic or hieroglyphic) and reading direction influenced cognitive processing strategies (Hoosain, 1991, Reilly, Radach, 2012). We assume that the users of hieroglyphic writing systems can demonstrate holistic patterns of semantic stimuli perception and show better results in reading vertically-oriented targets. In the current study, we compare performance and eye-movement patterns of Russian, Japanese and Chinese students in a visual semantic search task which involved looking for English words among chaotically arranged letters of Latin alphabet. Number, spatial orientation of found words and oculomotor activity parametres (fixations, saccades and blinking) were registered with SMIRED eye-tracker. Data (analyzed with IBM SPSS Statistics) show that different search strategies are reflected in the proportions of fixation and saccade times. Mean saccadic amplitude for the group results of East Asian students grows twice as compared to that of the group of Russian students (11,5 vs 5,5;F(1;394)=58,9;p<0,01). The Kotval index comparison confirms the trend (ratio of fixation and saccade duration is 4,63 vs 10,17;p<0,001). As the task presupposed letter-by-letter analysis of the stimuli, East Asian students who chose the holistic strategy were less successful. Though, the percentage of successful identifications for vertically-oriented words was significantly higher among them as compared to Russian participants. Thus, the core hypotheses of the study were confirmed, suggesting further research into the influence of language system on cognitive processing.