title: The role of language in memory for actions.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: University of Arizona, Tucson, Arizona 85721-0025, USA. msf@u.arizona.edu
authors.forename: Matthew
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Finkbeiner
authors.forename: Janet
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Nicol
authors.forename: Delia
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Greth
authors.forename: Kumiko
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Nakamura
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008568:Memory; D011597:Psychomotor Performance