How language impacts memory of motion events in English and French

This paper examines whether cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding affect event processing, specifically memory performance. We compared speakers of two languages which differ strikingly in how they habitually encode M anner and P ath of motion (Talmy in Toward a cognitive semantics: typolo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Cognitive processing 2015-09, Vol.16 (Suppl 1), p.209-213
Main Authors: Engemann, Helen, Hendriks, Henriëtte, Hickmann, Maya, Soroli, Efstathia, Vincent, Coralie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Analysis of Variance
Artificial Intelligence
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Cross-Cultural Comparison
England
Female
France
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Language
Linguistics
Male
Memory - physiology
Motion
Neurosciences
Photic Stimulation
Psycholinguistics
Psychology
Short Report
Space Perception - physiology
Verbal Behavior
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Summary:This paper examines whether cross-linguistic differences in motion encoding affect event processing, specifically memory performance. We compared speakers of two languages which differ strikingly in how they habitually encode M anner and P ath of motion (Talmy in Toward a cognitive semantics: typology and process in concept structuring, 2nd edn, vol 2. MIT Press, Cambridge, 2000 ). We tested French and English adult native speakers across three tasks that recruited and/or suppressed verbal processing to different extents: verbal event descriptions elicited on the basis of dynamic motion stimuli, a verbal memory task testing the impact of prior verbalisation on target recognition, and a non - verbal memory task , using a dual-task paradigm to suppress internal verbalisation. Results showed significant group differences in the verbal description task, which mirrored expected typological tendencies. English speakers more frequently expressed both M anner and P ath information than French speakers, who produced more descriptions encoding either P ath or M anner alone. However, these differences in linguistic encoding did not significantly affect speakers’ memory performance in the memory recognition tasks, neither in the verbal nor in the non-verbal condition. The findings contribute to current debates regarding the conditions under which language effects occur and the relative weight of language-specific and universal constraints on spatial cognition.
ISSN:1612-4782
1612-4790
DOI:10.1007/s10339-015-0696-7