Verb Representation and Thinking-for-Speaking Effects in Spanish–English Bilinguals

Abstract

Does the language we speak influence how we think about the events in our experience? If so, do bilingual speakers construe the same event in different ways, depending on the language they use to verbally encode that event? Or does one of the languages play a more dominant role in influencing event construal? The present study investigates whether bilingual speakers attend to different aspects of a motion event, depending on the language they use to first describe that event. Specifically, we explore whether language-specific verb representations used in encoding motion events influence subsequent performance in a nonlinguistic similarity judgment task in Spanish-English bilinguals.We will begin by looking at different perspectives on whether language influences thought, including views on linguistic relativity and "thinking-for-speaking." Then we will focus on the domain of motion. We will present linguistic accounts of the semantic representations of motion verbs and discuss the crosslinguistic difference between English and Spanish. Next, we will review empirical studies that examine how verbal encodings influence motion event construal in monolinguals. We will also review empirical studies that explore linguistic relativity versus thinking-forspeaking in bilinguals. We then go on describe the current study. In the final section of the chapter, we discuss our findings in light of thinking-for-speaking effects, how events are conceptualized for language production, and the nature of representations in the bilingual mind.

Motion Event Similarity Judgments in One or Two Languages: An Exploration of Monolingual Speakers of English and Chinese vs. L2 Learners of English

“…These findings echo those obtained by Lai and Narasimhan (2015) who examine how bilingual speakers of English and Spanish conceptualize motion events in a forced similarity judgment task. It is reported that bilinguals who describe a motion event in English in the first instance tend to select the event that has the same manner of motion as the target scene significantly more frequently than bilinguals who encode the same event in Spanish prior to judgment.…”

Thinking-for-speaking in early and late bilinguals

“…We manipulated bilinguals’ immediate language use with the test language by having them verbally describe the motion events in the test language prior to classifying motion events. During the experiment, a native Spanish or English experimenter chatted with the participants in the test language prior to the experimental task (Brown & Gullberg, 2011; Lai & Narasimhan, 2008) in order to put the bilingual participants in a “monolingual mode” (Grosjean, 2001, p. 5). Then, participants performed a similarity judgment task with verbal encoding.…”