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Grammatical aspect influences motion event perception: findings from a cross- linguistic non-verbal recognition task*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 January 2014

MONIQUE FLECKEN ,
CHRISTIANE VON STUTTERHEIM  and
MARY CARROLL
MONIQUE FLECKEN*
Affiliation:
Radboud University Nijmegen, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behaviour, the Netherlands
CHRISTIANE VON STUTTERHEIM
Affiliation:
Heidelberg University, Germany
MARY CARROLL
Affiliation:
Heidelberg University, Germany
*
†Address for correspondence: Monique Flecken, Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University, Montessorilaan 3, 6525 HR Nijmegen, The Netherlands. e-mail: m.flecken@donders.ru.nl
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Abstract

Using eye-tracking as a window on cognitive processing, this study investigates language effects on attention to motion events in a non-verbal task. We compare gaze allocation patterns by native speakers of German and Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), two languages that differ with regard to the grammaticalization of temporal concepts. Findings of the non-verbal task, in which speakers watch dynamic event scenes while performing an auditory distracter task, are compared to gaze allocation patterns which were obtained in an event description task, using the same stimuli. We investigate whether differences in the grammatical aspectual systems of German and MSA affect the extent to which endpoints of motion events are linguistically encoded and visually processed in the two tasks. In the linguistic task, we find clear language differences in endpoint encoding and in the eye-tracking data (attention to event endpoints) as well: German speakers attend to and linguistically encode endpoints more frequently than speakers of MSA. The fixation data in the non-verbal task show similar language effects, providing relevant insights with regard to the language-and-thought debate. The present study is one of the few studies that focus explicitly on language effects related to grammatical concepts, as opposed to lexical concepts.

Keywords

Linguistic relativityverbal aspectmotion event cognitionnon-verbal taskeye trackingvisual attentionArabicGerman
Type
Research Article
Information
Language and Cognition , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , March 2014 , pp. 45 - 78
Copyright
Copyright © UK Cognitive Linguistics Association 2014 

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Footnotes

*

We would like to thank the DFG (German Research Foundation) and the NWO Veni scheme (Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research) for financial support for this study.

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