Polyphasic Pictorial Perception

Abstract

This study tests a hypothesis arising from the authors' previous work, that writing picture-interpretation stories in a second language makes subjects more stimulus-bound and therefore more likely to fragment in time the events occurring in the picture (polyphasic perception). Rhodesian upper primary-school children responded to the same pictures in either English or Shona. No relationship between language medium and stimulus-binding, or between stimulus-binding and polyphasic responding, was observed. Furthermore, the previously observed preponderance of polyphasic responses by African children failed to appear, and a second sample of "Colored" and "Asian" children gave fewer polyphasic responses than Western children normally do. The lack of evidence for a truly perceptual phenomenon is underlined.