Cultural variation in the structure of internal representations: testing the orthographic hypothesis

Cultural differences comprise not only outwardly observable behaviors, but also internal psychological traits. One poorly understood domain of cross-cultural psychological variation is the organization of internal mental representations, and how this variation arises from experiential differences. Such an understanding could help reveal fundamental ways in which culture shapes the mind. Here we use the Internal Representations Questionnaire (IRQ) to investigate cross-cultural differences in modalities of thought such as visual imagery and internal speech. We compare respondents in China and Japan to the original US sample, testing the preregistered hypothesis that the structure of internal representations is associated with variation in writing systems. We found evidence of differences in factor structure between the US sample and the Japanese and Chinese respondents. An exploratory factor analysis for the Chinese data revealed that some aspects of inner speech are statistically inseparable from orthographic imagery in this population—an outcome consistent with psycholinguistic and neuroimaging findings about the development of an orthography-to-semantics direct pathway in Chinese readers but not in alphabetic readers. These findings suggest the presence of meaningful cultural variation in the structure of internal representations, which may be a downstream consequence of variation in writing systems.