Motion events in language and cognition

Abstract

This study investigated whether different lexicalization patterns of motion events in English and Spanish predict how speakers of these languages perform in non-linguistic tasks. Using 36 motion events, we compared English and Spanish speakers' linguistic descriptions to their performance on two non-linguistic tasks: recognition memory and similarity judgments. We investigated the effect of language processing on non-linguistic performance by varying the nature of the encoding before testing for recognition and similarity. Participants encoded the events while describing them verbally or not. No effect of language was obtained in the recognition memory task after either linguistic or non-linguistic encoding and in the similarity task after non-linguistic encoding. We did find a linguistic effect in the similarity task after verbal encoding, an effect that conformed to languagespecific patterns. Linguistic descriptions directed attention to certain aspects of the events later used to make a non-linguistic judgment. This suggests that linguistic and non-linguistic performance are dissociable, but language-specific regularities made available in the experimental context may mediate the speaker's performance in specific tasks. q

Conversation and convention: Enduring influences on name choice for common objects

“…This outcome is most likely due to differences in the importance of memory in the different processes: The name retrieved for an object on any occasion will be strongly influenced by episodes of associating the name to the object, whereas mental comparison of a specific object with a standard is less affected by past experience. This difference provides an explanation for how different populations of speakers may acquire different naming patterns within a domain while holding shared nonlinguistic understanding of the objects (Gennari, Sloman, Malt, & Fitch, 2002;Malt et al, 1999). Views of categorization as applied to the problem of object naming have focused almost exclusively on the role of the physical features and current function of the objects in naming choices, along with some attention to inferences about the object's intended use or origin.…”

Color categories: Evidence for the cultural relativity hypothesis

“…Recent systematic investigations of the relationship between language and thought have likewise provided evidence for both views. Differences between languages in grammatical structure and range of terminology have been associated with altered perceived similarity between objects and actions, as well as to different memories of the same experience in the following domains: number systems (Gumperz & Levinson, 1997); spatial relations (Levinson, 1996;Bowerman & Choi, 2001), artifact categories (Malt & Johnson, 1998); modes of motion (Gennari, et al, 2000); time (Boroditsky, 2001); material and shape classification (Lucy, 1992); shape (Roberson, Davidoff & Shapiro, 2002) and grammatical gender (Clarke et al, 1981(Clarke et al, , 1984Sera, Berge & Pintado, 1994;Sera et al, 2001, Boroditsky, in press). Other studies have argued against the influence of linguistic differences on perceptual classification, both at the level of terminology (Munnich & Landau, 2003;Malt et al, 1999) and grammatical structure (Karmiloff-Smith, 1979; Color categories 4 Pérez-Pereira, 1991).…”

Minding Your Manners: Linguistic Relativity in Motion

“…In contrast, satellite-framed languages, such as Germanic and Slavic languages, tend to encode the Path of motion in a separate element (the satellite), thus leaving the verb free to encode Manner along with the fact of motion, as seen in example (1). The categorization of languages as either verb-framed or satellite-framed has received support from the appearance of similar patterns in elicited motion descriptions across a variety of studies and a variety of languages (BERMAN; SLOBIN, 1994;GENNARI et al 2002;MASSEY;GLEITMAN, 2002;MASSEY;GLEITMAN, 2006;SLOBIN, 1996;STRÖMQVIST;VERHOEVEN 2004, inter alia). While Talmy's observations, and the elicited data, make clear that speakers of different languages talk about motion differently, there remains an open question regarding whether speakers also think about motion differently.…”

“…As a result, we might expect speakers of verb-framed languages to pay more attention to Path than to Manner, while speakers of satellite-framed languages may exhibit the opposite pattern. This hypothesis has been tested across a multitude of studies, including those focused on recognition memory (e.g., BILLMAN;KRYCH, 1998;GENNARI et al 2002;MASSEY;GLEITMAN, 2002), judgments of similarity (e.g., FINKBEINER et al 2002;GENNARI et al 2002;Página593 PAPAFRAGOU;MASSEY;GLEITMAN, 2002), and visual attention (e.g., PAPAFRAGOU; HULBERT; TRUESWELL, 2008), with mixed results.…”

“…However, a flurry of research GENTNER, 2006;GENNARI et al, 2002;TERRAZAS, 1998;HULBERT;TRUESWELL, 2008; among others) …”