TY - JOUR
T1 - The role of language in memory for actions
AU - Finkbeiner, Matthew
AU - Nicol, Janet
AU - Greth, Delia
AU - Nakamura, Kumiko
N1 - Funding Information:
The authors gratefully acknowledge support for this research from a number 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. 1University 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 3The order of the first two authors was determined by flipping a coin.
PY - 2002
Y1 - 2002
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
KW - Language
KW - Linguistic relativity
KW - Motion events
KW - Working memory
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U2 - 10.1023/A:1021204802485
DO - 10.1023/A:1021204802485
M3 - Article
C2 - 12528427
AN - SCOPUS:0036768292
SN - 0090-6905
VL - 31
SP - 447
EP - 457
JO - Journal of psycholinguistic research
JF - Journal of psycholinguistic research
IS - 5
ER -