title: The natural order of events: how speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally.
abstract: To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an event with pictures). We found that the word orders speakers used in their everyday speech did not influence their nonverbal behavior. Surprisingly, speakers of all four languages used the same order and on both nonverbal tasks. This order, actor-patient-act, is analogous to the subject-object-verb pattern found in many languages of the world and, importantly, in newly developing gestural languages. The findings provide evidence for a natural order that we impose on events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when constructing language anew.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5730 South Woodlawn Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA. sgm@uchicago.edu
authors.forename: Susan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Goldin-Meadow
authors.forename: Wing Chee
authors.initials: WC
authors.lastname: So
authors.forename: Asli
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ozyürek
authors.forename: Carolyn
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Mylander
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D005868:Gestures; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D013060:Speech; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis