Getting the ball rolling: the cross-linguistic conceptualization of caused motion

Abstract

Does the way we talk about events correspond to how we conceptualize them? Three experiments (N = 135) examined how Spanish and Swedish native speakers judge event similarity in the domain of caused motion (‘He rolled the tyre into the barn’). Spanish and Swedish motion descriptions regularly encode path (‘into’), but differ in how systematically they include manner information (‘roll’). We designed a similarity arrangement task which allowed participants to give varying weights to different dimensions when gauging event similarity. The three experiments progressively reduced the likelihood that speakers were using language to solve the task. We found that, as long as the use of language was possible (Experiments 1 and 2), Swedish speakers were more likely than Spanish speakers to base their similarity arrangements on object manner (rolling/sliding). However, when recruitment of language was hindered through verbal interference, cross-linguistic differences disappeared (Experiment 3). A compound analysis of all experiments further showed that (i) cross-linguistic differences were played out against a backdrop of commonly represented event components, and (ii) describing vs. not describing the events did not augment cross-linguistic differences, but instead had similar effects across languages. We interpret these findings as suggesting a dynamic role of language in event conceptualization.

Thinking Is Modulated by Recent Linguistic Experience: Second Language Priming Affects Perceived Event Similarity

“…First, participants’ similarity ratings were more sensitive to path than to manner (see coefficients for main effects for path and manner in Appendix S2). An overall greater effect of path than manner on similarity ratings replicates previous results with Spanish and Swedish monolinguals using the same stimuli and a similar arrangement task (Montero‐Melis & Bylund, ) and might be indicative of a higher salience of path compared to manner (Talmy, ), at least in the present stimulus set (see Papafragou & Selimis, , for a discussion of stimuli artifacts). Second, priming condition mainly modulated participants’ reliance on the manner component and only marginally affected reliance on path.…”

“…() found. This would explain why the control group resembled the path‐primed group and would also be in line with the results of a study comparing Spanish and Swedish monolinguals on a similar arrangement task, in which Spanish speakers relied less on manner, compared to Swedish speakers (Montero‐Melis & Bylund, ).…”

“…We tested native Swedish speakers of L2 Spanish in the domain of caused motion because of the following crosslinguistic features. First, path and manner information is consistently included in Swedish L1 descriptions of caused motion (Montero‐Melis & Bylund, ); thus, we may assume a certain homogeneity in participants’ L1‐based linguistic experience. Second, Spanish allows for more varied structural patterns to describe these events, making it possible to create prime sentences that vary in their semantic content, while holding syntactic structure constant.…”

“…For now, the evidence is mixed as to whether motion event cognition beyond speech varies between monolingual speakers of different languages. Some studies have found either no effect of language on how we remember and categorize motion events (Papafragou et al., ), or an effect only when participants were linguistically biased (Gennari et al., ; Papafragou & Selimis, ), while others have found evidence of such an effect even in the absence of tasks involving overt linguistic behavior (Kersten et al., ; Montero‐Melis & Bylund, ). One explanation of the contradictory results might be that describing events constitutes an inherently more complex form of linguistic labelling than naming objects (Lupyan, ) and that crosslinguistic differences in descriptions are probabilistic rather than categorical, showing great within‐language variability (Berthele, ; Goschler & Stefanowitsch, ).…”

How do Korean–English bilinguals speak and think about motion events? Evidence from verbal and non-verbal tasks

“…Second, the present study used a non-verbal task (i.e., triads-matching task), in which participants to had to make a forced choice between path and manner. While this task has been popular among previous studies that investigated motion event cognition, more recent studies (Kersten et al, 2010; Montero-Melis & Bylund, 2017; Montero-Melis, Eisenbeiss, Narasimhan, Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Kita, Kopecka, Lüpke, Nikitina, Tragel, Florian Jaeger & Bohnemeyer, 2017) have pointed out that this task, by its design, confounds path and manner preferences 4 . That is, it assumes that a higher path preference is equivalent to a lower manner preference when, in fact, both S-languages and V-languages prominently encode path information, and the difference between the two group lies in their frequency of manner encoding.…”