Attribution of responsibility by Spanish and English speakers: How native language affects our social judgments

Abstract

The relationship between language and thought has received a great deal of attention in linguistics. An increasing amount of empirical literature now suggests that our native language can affect how we think about the world around us. The present study asked two groups of participants to read the same story and to judge the attribution of the responsibility of a character in the story who may have caused an accident. One group of participants consisted of native Spanish speakers reading a Spanish version of the text; the other group consisted of native English speakers reading an English version of the text. The results showed that the native language of the participant yielded a subtle, but significant, indicator of attribution of responsibility. This finding supports the linguistic relativity hypothesis, which states that one's native language affects the way one conceptualizes the world.

Linguistic Schemata: The Differential Recall of Accidental Events in Spanish-Fluent Bilinguals and English Monolinguals During Reading

“…On the other hand, bilingual Spanish speakers may be most successful in describing the actions and recognizing the appropriate level of blame to place on agents in purposeful versus accidental events. (This latter point, incorporating blame perception, falls in accordance with research by Tillman, Langston, and Louwerse (2013), which revealed differential blame placement according to language background and agentive language use.) If Spanish speakers preferentially encode actions, as demonstrated by the present research, they may also remember more information about severity and intent of said actions.…”

“…In contrast to English's use of agentive language, Spanish describes accidental events by conjugating the verb to match the affected object and stating the blamed party, if any, as an indirect object ("the chair was broken by him," or simply "the chair was broken"), creating a non-agentive syntax (Cunningham, Vaid, & Chen 2011;Tillman, Langston, & Louwerse 2013). The Spanish phrasing is typically created using the clitic "se," which allows speakers to use the middle voice when referencing the event, thereby removing any sense of blame from the person causing the accident (Quesada 1998).…”

“…Under the theories of Loftus and Palmer, the findings would suggest the native language groups not only described the accidents differently, but also differentially recalled the intensity of the accident itself. There are causal factors leading to the differences between L1 groups, which could result from the languages' differential effects on blame interpretation, yet the behavioral outcome of varied recall according to linguistic background may be the most interesting and applicable conclusion for the world of eye-witness testimony Fausey, Long, Inamori, & Boroditsky 2010;Tillman, Langston, and Louwerse 2013).…”