Inteligencia

Journal of Psycholinguistic Research, Vol. 31, No. 5, September 2002 (© 2002)

The Role of Language in Memory for Actions
Matthew Finkbeiner,1,2 Janet Nicol,1 Delia Greth,1 and Kumiko Nakamura1,3
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 ofexperiments 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, thelanguage 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. KEY WORDS: language; linguistic relativity; motion events; working memory.

INTRODUCTION Motion events typically involvesome kind of movement from one point to another. Languages differ in their tendency to encode the manner of movement as part of the verb or to express manner in a separate lexical item. Some languages, such as English, contain many verbs that encode the manner of the action (verbs such as trot, scamper, slither), whereas other lanThe authors gratefully acknowledge support for this research from anumber of sources, including the Faculty Small Grants Program (Office of the Vice President for Research and Graduate Studies, in conjunction with the University of Arizona Foundation, grant NIDCD DC-01409 (as part of the National Center for Neurogenic Communication Disorders, University of Arizona), and the Cognitive Science Program, University of Arizona. 1 University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona. 2To whom correspondence should be addressed at Communication 302, P. O. Box 210025, University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0025. Fax: 520-626-4300; email: msf@u. arizona.edu 3 The order of the first two authors was determined by flipping a coin. 447
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guages, such as Spanish andJapanese, contain fewer such verbs; manner of motion may appear separately from the lexical item expressing motion (Choi & Bowerman, 1991; Kageyama, 1996; Naigles & Terrazas, 1998; Talmy, 2000). For example, the way to express “The boy ran across the street” in Spanish and Japanese is as follows: (1) El niño cruzo’ la calle corriendo. The boy crossed the street running. (2) sono otokonoko-ga toHri-o hashi-Qte
the boy-NOM street-ACC run-GERUND

wataQ-ta
cross-PAST

The boy crossed the street running. Note that in both examples the manner of crossing the street is expressed in a separate lexical item from the verb expressing motion (note further that in these particular cases, direction of movement, or path, is conflated with motion). Although Spanish and Japanese are distinct fromEnglish in terms of lexicalized properties of verbs (Talmy, 2000), the distinction is not absolute: both Spanish speakers and Japanese speakers frequently use verbs that conflate manner with motion. In a recent study, Naigles, Eisenberg, Kako, Highter, and McGraw (1998) observed that whereas English speakers used primarily manner verbs in their descriptions of action pictures (90%), Spanish speakersused both manner verbs and path verbs (46% and 38%, respectively) in their descriptions. In this paper, we consider the extent to which cross-linguistic differences in how manner of motion is typically lexicalized may affect peoples’ behavior on nonlinguistic similarity judgment tasks. The majority of work concerned with showing how differences in cross-linguistic usage covary (or not) with...