The role of conceptualization during language production: evidence from event encoding

Papafragou, Anna; Grigoroglou, Myrto

doi:10.1080/23273798.2019.1589540

Cited by 31 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 63 publications

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“…When the context was talking to a friend, participants showed a more frequent use of naar, compared to that of talking to a police officer. This finding provides empirical support for the view that contextual factors affect endpoint conceptualization ( (Papafragou & Grigoroglou, 2019).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

“…Most of the time, we are talking to one another about an event and sometimes we are describing an event with a certain listener or reader in mind. Papafragou and Grigoroglou (2019) argued that the person to whom we are talking affects how we conceptualize an event endpoint during message planning. Speakers might even define the endpoint of a simple event, for instance making a bed, differently depending on to whom they are talking: their mother or an exacting 5-star hotel manager.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Directional prepositions and event endpoint conceptualization: a study ofnaarandrichtingin Dutch

2020

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Two Dutch directional prepositions (i.e., naar and richting) provide a useful paradigm to study endpoint conceptualization. Experiment 1 adopted a sentence comprehension task and confirmed the linguistic proposal that, when naar was used in motion event descriptions, participants were more certain that the reference object was the goal of the agent than when richting was used. Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 used this linguistic pair to test the effect of two factors (i.e., the actor’s goal and the interlocutor’s status) on endpoint conceptualization via language production tasks. We found significant effects of both factors. First, participants chose naar more often when there was an inference in the referential situation that the reference object was the actor’s goal than when there was no such inference. Second, participants chose richting more often when they were told to describe the referential scenario to a police officer than to a friend. Participants were more cautious with their statements and were less willing to commit themselves to stating the goal of the agent when talking to a police officer than to a friend. The results are discussed in relation to relevant linguistic theories and event theories.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 73%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Directional prepositions and event endpoint conceptualization: a study ofnaarandrichtingin Dutch

2020

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“…When we talk about events that are happening in the world around us, we usually mention only a subset of the information that is available to us. The process of selecting which information to include may be guided by the structure of our conceptual representations, by our communicative goals, and by the language that we speak (Levelt 1989; see also Papafragou & Grigoroglou 2019, for a recent review).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How children attend to events before speaking: crosslinguistic evidence from the motion domain

Bunger

Skordos

Trueswell

et al. 2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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How do children talk about the dynamic world around them? In this eyetracking study, we demonstrate language-specific patterns in the way 3-and 4-year-old speakers of English and Greek inspect motion events prior to speaking and describe such events in their native language. Across age and language groups, children were more likely to mention manners of motion than paths, but English-speaking children were more likely to provide manner information than Greek-speaking children were. Comparison of eyegaze patterns from the linguistic (description) task to eyegaze patterns observed during a nonlinguistic (memory) task with a different group of English-and Greekspeaking 3-and 4-year-olds revealed effects of language background on event inspection. These effects suggest that by the age of 3 years, children exhibit sensitivities to language-specific patterns of motion event encoding that influence the way they gather information from the visual world during the process of language production.

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“…Influential theories of language production assume that speaking begins with a preverbal apprehension of broad details of an event that contains structured package of information, also known as a preverbal message (Levelt, 1989, cf. Bock, Irwin, & Davidson, 2004; Lashley, 1951; Paul, 1970; Wundt, 1970; see Papafragou & Grigoroglou, 2019, for a recent review). This preverbal message is constructed by drawing on the resources of the human mind that are responsible for conceptualizing different aspects of the world, including people, objects, places, time, and relations, among others.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Event Representation to Linguistic Meaning

Ünal

Papafragou

2019

Topics in Cognitive Science

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A fundamental aspect of human cognition is the ability to parse our constantly unfolding experience into meaningful representations of dynamic events and to communicate about these events with others. How do we communicate about events we have experienced? Influential theories of language production assume that the formulation and articulation of a linguistic message is preceded by preverbal apprehension that captures core aspects of the event. Yet the nature of these preverbal event representations and the way they are mapped onto language are currently not well understood. Here, we review recent evidence on the link between event conceptualization and language, focusing on two core aspects of event representation, event roles and event boundaries. Empirical evidence in both domains shows that the cognitive representation of events aligns with the way these aspects of events are encoded in language, providing support for the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and cognitive event structure.

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The role of conceptualization during language production: evidence from event encoding

Cited by 31 publications

References 63 publications

Directional prepositions and event endpoint conceptualization: a study ofnaarandrichtingin Dutch

Directional prepositions and event endpoint conceptualization: a study ofnaarandrichtingin Dutch

How children attend to events before speaking: crosslinguistic evidence from the motion domain

From Event Representation to Linguistic Meaning

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