The role of language in memory for actions

Languages differ with respect to how aspects of motion events tend to be lexicalized. English typically conflates MOTION with MANNER, but Japanese and Spanish typically do not. We report a set of experiments that assessed the effect of this cross-linguistic difference on participants' decisions...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of psycholinguistic research Vol. 31; no. 5; pp. 447 - 457
Main Authors Finkbeiner, Matthew, Nicol, Janet, Greth, Delia, Nakamura, Kumiko
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published United States Springer Nature B.V 01.09.2002
Subjects
Cognitive Processes
Cognitive Psychology
Communication Disorders
Design of experiments
Graduate Study
Humans
Language
Language Role
Linguistics
Memory
Native Language
Native Speakers
Psychomotor Performance
Science Programs
Short Term Memory
Stimuli
Verbs
United States > US
Arizona
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Summary:Languages differ with respect to how aspects of motion events tend to be lexicalized. English typically conflates MOTION with MANNER, but Japanese and Spanish typically do not. We report a set of experiments that assessed the effect of this cross-linguistic difference on participants' decisions in a similarity-judgment task about scenes containing novel animations as stimuli. In Experiment 1, which required participants to encode the stimuli briefly into memory, we observed a language effect; in Experiment 2, which required participants to analyze the same stimuli, but not remember them, the language effect disappeared. Hence, these experiments reveal a task-dependent effect, which, we argue, points to working memory as the source of the language effect observed in Experiment 1 and, potentially, other experiments that have shown a linguistic relativity effect.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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ISSN:0090-6905
1573-6555
DOI:10.1023/A:1021204802485