Keeping the Result in Sight and Mind: General Cognitive Principles and Language‐Specific Influences in the Perception and Memory of Resultative Events

Abstract

We study how people attend to and memorize endings of events that differ in the degree to which objects in them are affected by an action: Resultative events show objects that undergo a visually salient change in state during the course of the event (peeling a potato), and non‐resultative events involve objects that undergo no, or only partial state change (stirring in a pan). We investigate general cognitive principles, and potential language‐specific influences, in verbal and nonverbal event encoding and memory, across two experiments with Dutch and Estonian participants. Estonian marks a viewer's perspective on an event's result obligatorily via grammatical case on direct object nouns: Objects undergoing a partial/full change in state in an event are marked with partitive/accusative case, respectively. Therefore, we hypothesized increased saliency of object states and event results in Estonian speakers, as compared to speakers of Dutch. Findings show (a) a general cognitive principle of attending carefully to endings of resultative events, implying cognitive saliency of object states in event processing; (b) a language‐specific boost on attention and memory of event results under verbal task demands in Estonian speakers. Results are discussed in relation to theories of event cognition, linguistic relativity, and thinking for speaking.

The Effect of Language‐Specific Characteristics on English and Japanese Speakers' Ability to Recall Number Information

“…Previous studies have investigated the effect of availability/frequency of grammatical constructions on speakers' ability to recall information (e.g., Fausey & Boroditsky, 2011; Sakarias & Flecken, 2019; Tajima & Duffield, 2012; Tosun et al, 2013), but the current study is the first linking the lack of compulsory number information with a decrease in the ability to recall plurality information in a language that has number concepts and linguistic means to talk about number.…”

“…One additional participant (an English male) was tested, but excluded for not focusing on the task. The sample sizes were chosen to broadly reflect sample sizes in a number of previous studies testing the effect of cross‐linguistic grammatical features on the recall of visual information (e.g., Sakarias & Flecken, 2019; Tajima & Duffield, 2012; Tosun et al, 2013). The participants were recruited from their universities, workplace, or through friends and were individually tested in a quiet room at their university, workplace, or private home.…”

“…A number of previous studies have investigated Whorfian effects on visual memory, some providing evidence for these effects (e.g., Fausey & Boroditsky, 2011;Frank et al, 2008;Gordon, 2004;Sakarias & Flecken, 2019;Tajima & Duffield, 2012;Tosun et al, 2013), but some failing to do so (e.g., Xu, 2017 andRosch Heider &Olivier, 1972 on color;€ Unal et al, 2016 for source memory). Even though some previous studies have failed to find Whorfian effects for recall, previous studies investigating number cognition suggest that limited number vocabulary does have an effect on speakers' ability to recall number information (e.g., Everett & Madora, 2012;Frank et al, 2008;Gordon, 2004).…”

“…Previous research suggests that structural/labeling differences between languages can result in differences in recall, for example, on source evidence (Tosun, Vaid, & Geraci, 2013, but see Ünal, Pinto, Bunger, & Papafragou, 2016), agency (e.g., Fausey & Boroditsky, 2011), resultative events (Sakarias & Flecken, 2019), figure‐ground information (e.g., Masuda & Nisbett, 2001; Tajima & Duffield, 2012), and color (e.g., Davidoff, Davies, & Roberson, 1999; Roberson, Davies, & Davidoff, 2000; but see Cibelli, Xu, Austerweil, Griffiths, & Regier, 2016; Regier & Xu, 2017; Rosch Heider & Olivier, 1972). Tajima and Duffield (2012) investigated whether the linguistic difference in the conventional way to express figure‐ground information by English and Chinese versus Japanese speakers results in difference in recall of figure or ground information.…”

“…Namely, speakers of English—a language that conventionally uses agentive sentence structures (e.g., He broke the vase ) in deliberate and accidental contexts were more likely to remember the agent of accidental scenes than Spanish speakers whose language conventionally uses agentive structures in deliberate actions but in accidental contexts a structure that de‐emphasizes agency (e.g., Se rompió el florero “The vase broke itself ” ). Sakarias and Flecken's (2019) study investigated Estonian and Dutch speakers and found that the presence of a morphological distinction (partitive vs. accusative) in Estonian between resultative (e.g., peeling a potato ) and non‐resultative (e.g., stirring a pan ) events, respectively, and the absence of such distinction in Dutch affected the recall of the endings of causative events. Namely, the Estonian speakers were more accurate in recalling if the action they had seen in a video clip had concluded, compared to Dutch speakers in the condition where the participants described the videos with one sentence immediately after having seen them.…”