III. Reading Comprehension: Read the following passages and choose the most appropriateanswer to each question.
【A】
         Psycholinguistics is a field at the intersection of psychology and linguistics, and one of itsrecent discoveries is that the languages we speak influence our eye movements. For example,English speakers who hear the word “candle” often look at “candy” because the two words share thefirst syllable. Research with speakers of different languages revealed that bilingual speakers look notonly at words that share sounds in one language, but also at words that share sounds across their twolanguages. When Russian-English bilinguals hear the English word “marker,” they also look at astamp because the Russian word for a stamp is “marka.”
         Even more stunning, speakers of different languages differ in their patterns of eye movementswhen no language is used at all. In a simple visual search task in which people had to find apreviously seen object among other objects, their eyes moved differently depending on the languagesthey knew. For example, when looking for a clock, English speakers also looked at a cloud. Spanishspeakers, on the other hand, when looking for the same clock, looked at a present, because theSpanish names for clock and present—reloj and regalo—overlap at word onset.
         The story doesn’t end there. Not only do the words we hear activate other similar-soundingwords, and not only do we look at objects whose names share sounds or letters even when nolanguage is heard, but the translations of those names in other languages become activated as well inspeakers of more than one language. For example, when Spanish-English bilinguals hear the word“duck” in English, they also look at a shovel, because the translations of duck and shovel—pato andpala, respectively—overlap in Spanish.
          Because of the way our brains organize and process linguistic and non-linguistic information, asingle word can set off a domino effect that cascades throughout the cognitive system. And thisinteractivity and co-activation are not limited to spoken languages. Bilinguals of spoken and signedlanguages show co-activation as well. For example, bilinguals who know English and American SignLanguage (ASL) look at “cheese” when they hear the English word “paper” because cheese andpaper share three of the four sign components in ASL (handshape, location, and orientation, but notmotion).
        What do findings like these tell us? Not only is the language system thoroughly interactive witha high degree of co-activation across words and concepts, but it also impacts our processing in otherdomains—like vision, attention, and cognitive control. As we go about our everyday lives, how oureyes move, what we look at, and what we pay attention to is influenced in direct and measurableways by the languages we speak.
【題組】36. Which of the following titles can BEST describe the passage?
(A) The Language Influences What You See
(B) Some Words in Different Languages Share the First Syllable
(C) The Word Processing Is Complex in Bilinguals
(D) Human Brains Can Process Both Spoken and Sign Languages