TY - JOUR

T1 - Does grammatical aspect affect motion event cognition?

T2 - a cross-linguistic comparison of English and Swedish speakers

AU - Athanasopoulos, Panos

AU - Bylund, Emanuel

PY - 2013/3

Y1 - 2013/3

N2 - in this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based triads matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging.

AB - in this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based triads matching with and without verbal interference. Results showed between-group differences in verbal descriptions and in memory-based triads matching. However, no differences were found in online triads matching and in memory-based triads matching with verbal interference. These findings need to be interpreted in the context of the overall pattern of performance, which indicated that both groups based their similarity judgments on common perceptual characteristics of motion events. These results show for the first time a cross-linguistic difference in memory as a function of differences in grammatical aspect encoding, but they also contribute to the emerging view that language fine tunes rather than shapes perceptual processes that are likely to be universal and unchanging.

KW - Grammatical aspect

KW - Endpoint encoding

KW - Whorf

KW - Linguistic relativity

KW - Motion events

U2 - 10.1111/cogs.12006

DO - 10.1111/cogs.12006

M3 - Journal article

VL - 37

SP - 286

EP - 309

JO - Cognitive Science

JF - Cognitive Science

SN - 0364-0213

IS - 2

ER -