Psy1306 Language and Thought

1. Psy1306 Language and Thought Lectures 6 Path and Manner

2. Themes • Key Ideas Discussed: • Language is sketchy/selective • Use-it-or-loose-it/Functional reorganizing • Thinking for Speaking • Thinking for Later Speaking • Experiments • Population: • Prelinguistic Infants vs. Adults • Adults with different language background • Methodology: • Categorization via habituation or preferential looking • Triads Similarity Judgment • Recognition Memory • Eye-tracking as a window into thought • Labeling vs. No Labeling Prior to doing the above 3 tasks (Slides with white background are from A. Papafragou)

3. Path and Manner Components of Motion figure SNOOPY BALL  HOLE groundground FROM...TO... path ROLLING manner

4. Crosslinguistic Differences: Path and Manner Verb Preferences English Predominantly Manner Verbs The bottle floated out of the cave. Spanish (or Greek) Predominantly Path Verbs La botella salió flotando de la cueva. (The bottle exited floating from the cave.) Example from Talmy 1985 …children’s attention is heavily channeled in the direction of those semantic distinctions that are grammatically marked in the language. (Berman and Slobin, 1994)

5. English A butterfly is flying. MANNER V Greek Mia petaluda ‘a butterfly petai. is flying’ MANNER V Framing motion events cross-linguistically

6. A butterfly is flying MANNER V to a flower. PATH PP English Bounded Path constraint Greek Mia petaluda ‘a butterfly pai is going PATH V s’ena luludi. to a flower’ PATH PP Framing motion events cross-linguistically

7. Natural Divison • Using gestures, describe an event in which: • A cat, having swallowed a bowling ball, proceeds rapidly down a steep street in a wobbling, rolling manner.

8. Spanish speaker vs. NSL speaker Videos available from Science.

9. Prelinguistic Infants • Pulverman & Golinkoff (2004): 7-months-olds* • Casasola, Hohenstein, & Naigles (2003): 10-months-olds • Pulverman et al. (2007): 14-, 17-months-olds, Spanish vs. English learners* • Havasi & Snedeker (2004a, 2004b): Adults and children * Same problem of variance in objects used (as mentioned in last class)

10. Learning Path-Manner distinctions • Children converge rapidly on language-specific syntactic and semantic properties of motion Vs (Bowerman 1996, Choi & Bowerman 1991, Slobin 1996). • Adults are sensitive to the statistical regularities of linguistic packaging of motion events • in guessing meaning of novel motion Vs, Spanish speakers make more path conjectures than English speakers (Naigles & Terrazas 1998)

11. Path vs. Manner salience in motion cognition? Do speakers of English and Greek become differentially sensitive to Manner & Path of motion?

12. Do linguistic categories affect non-linguistic categorization? (Papafragou, Massey & Gleitman, Cognition 2002) Subjects: Monolingual native speakers of English and Greek. Two Age Groups: • 8-year-olds (14 English speakers and 22 Greek speakers); • Adults (20 English speakers and 21 Greek speakers).

13. Same-manner foil: man running down hallway Same-path foil: man walking up stairs Sample event:man running up stairs

14. Linguistic descriptions differ

15. …across age groups

16. Categorization does not differ!

17. Children vs. adults

18. Do linguistic categories affect memory?(Papafragou et al, Cognition 2002) Subjects: Monolingual native speakers of English and Greek. Three Age Groups: • 38 5/6-year-olds; • 38 11/12-year-olds; • 21 Adults. Two Sessions: (1) inspect and describe 6 pictures (2) new set of pictures: ‘Same or different?’

19. Session 2: Manner change boy tripping over log A test item Session 1 boy jumping over log

20. Session 2: Path change frog jumping out of bathroom A test item Session 1 frog jumping into bathroom

21. Memory is not affected!

22. Children vs. adults

23. Children vs. adults (2)

24. 3 crosslinguistic studies on Manner vs. Path Krych (2001). Doctoral dissertation, Stanford (English vs. Spanish) Gennari et al. (2002). Cognition (English vs. Spanish) Papafragou et al. (2002). Cognition (English vs. Greek) Target M: carry, P: exit Same Path M: drag, P: exit Same Manner M: carry, P: enter • Recognition • Participant sees events. Decide later (varied delays) whether they saw the events earlier. • Question: Are manner language speakers better at noticing • manner changes and vice versa? • Similarity Judgment (Triad Task) • Which one is like the target? • Question: Do manner language speakers prefer same manner • and vice versa?

25. 3 crosslinguistic studies on Manner vs. Path Krych (2001). Doctoral dissertation, Stanford (English vs. Spanish) Gennari et al. (2002). Cognition (English vs. Spanish) Papafragou et al. (2002). Cognition (English vs. Greek) RESULTS: Crosslinguistic Difference? Recognition Similarity Participant asked to label aloud event No Yes prior to task Participant not asked to label No No

26. Different Results • No language effect unless labeling occurs beforehand • Language effect w/o labeling • Any thoughts on why?

27. Language is sketchy • Language is not logically explicit, thought is: John and Mary bought a nice house [TOGETHER]. John and Mary got a good grade [EACH].

28. Language is selective • Not everything that is represented in mentalese is expressed when we speak: • Mary: Let’s go out. • John: It’s snowing. [and so we can’t go out]. • Because communication takes time and effort, only a fraction of the thought (in mentalese) is encoded in language. Speakers trust hearers to fill in the rest.

29. ‘Inferable manner’ scenes: Manwalking up stairs. ‘Opaque manner’ scenes:Man running up stairs. Manner in Greek! When is Manner of motion included? • Hypothesis: Manner information is included when manner of motion not predictable (esp. in Greek).

30. Inferability affects Manner encoding in Greek(Papafragou, Massey & Gleitman, Cognition 2006) % ofall descriptions which includesManner

31. Linguistic descriptions are flexible • Linguistic encoding of motion is selective. • Formulation of event descriptions flexibly adjusts to changing conversational pressures on-line • in speech of both young and more experienced speakers • Gap between linguistic descriptions and rich conceptual representations.

32. Can language affect motion event perception? • ‘(Speakers) code spatial perceptions at the time of experience in whatever output frameworks the speaker’s dominant language offers’. (Levinson 1996, p. 156)

33. An online study(Papafragou, Hulbert & Trueswell, 2008, Cognition) • Eye-movements as window onto what sorts of information humans use to build event representations, and when. • We compare how English and Greek speakers interrogate motion scenes while • preparing linguistic descriptions vs. • encoding information in memory

34. English vs. Greek speakers… … Linguistic Condition: Ss had to describe what happened. Nonlinguistic Condition: Ss had to remember what they saw. At the end of the experiment they were shown a still image and were asked if it belonged to any of the clips.

35. … animation unfolds (3 sec) animation freezes A sample trial BEEP L group: Ss inspect scenes… Ss describe scenes NL group: Ss inspect scenes… Ss study scenes more Eye movements were recorded throughout.

36. Bounded Path … Unbounded Path … Two types of events

37. … Linguistic task: Bounded events Bounded Path English: 78% manner Vs “A boy is driving his bike to a tent.” Greek: 36% manner Vs “A boy is going to a tent, on a bike.”

38. … Linguistic task: Unbounded events Unbounded Path English: 74% manner Vs “A boy is driving his bike.” Greek: 56% manner Vs “A boy is driving his bike.”

39. path manner clip freezes … … Eye movement data: Bounded events Animation (3 Seconds) Linguistic Description / Study Phase Proportion of Path minus Manner looks Time in 1/30th of Second Units

40. * * * p < 0.05 Bounded events: In Linguistic Task, the 2 populations differ: Sslook for what their language needs Animation (3 Seconds) Animation (3 Seconds) Linguistic Description Linguistic Description Proportion of Path minus Manner looks Time in 1/30th of Second Units

41. Study Phase Animation (3 Seconds) * Proportion of Path minus Manner looks Time in 1/30th of Second Units *p < 0.05 Nonlinguistic Task: Event perception the same! But differences in Study Phase:Ss study what their language doesn’t routinely encode

42. Unbounded Events:As expected, no major differences Linguistic Task Nonlinguistic Task Proportion of Goal minus Instrument looks Time in 1/30th of Second Units Time in 1/30th of Second Units

43. Conclusions • How we inspect a scene depends on task/ goals • Same is true if the task is linguistic: • Speakers focus on aspects of scenes which are routinely encoded by their language • Cf. eye-movement production studies within a given language by Levelt, Bock, Griffin, a.o. • For the first time we show here that these looking patterns differ cross-linguistically: • Where languages differ from each other in how they encode event structure, this difference shows up in how scenes are interrogated during speech planning

44. Conclusions (cont.) • But when inspecting the world freely, all humans are alike, regardless of the language they speak • Interrogation of an unfolding event (cf. our nonling task) generates nearly identical sequences of shifts in attention

45. Conclusions (cont.) • Nevertheless, important cross-linguistic differences in how perceptions are encoded in memory • Differences in nonling task when video freezes: • Ss presumably encode events rapidly in declarative memory • Truly contra-Whorfian result: • People then proceed to interrogate those aspects of the scene that they couldn't map onto an accessible precompiled linguistic-semantic form (e.g., the lexical semantics of verbs and their argument structures).

46. Language effects on thought? • Test case: space and motion • Salience effects not found • Path/Manner asymmetries in language are not reflected in categorization, memory or apprehension of motion • Linguistic effects emerge when language is implicated in task.

47. Discussion Qs • Test case generalizability? • Differences between the test case of this class and last class?

48. Language affects category salience • …learning a language can affect nonlinguistic cognition by selectively maintaining or discouraging sensitivity to (…) distinctions that are, or are not, relevant to that language. • Bowerman & Choi (2003)

49. Testing the ‘boundary’ and ‘salience’ hypotheses • What is a non-linguistic task? • Most tasks (memory, categorization) involve the use of language in the instructions. • People may be covertly using linguistic labels to remember or categorize ambiguous stimuli. • Does this count as a ‘Whorfian’ effect or as a ‘language on language’ effect?

50. Testing the ‘boundary’ and ‘salience’ hypotheses • What counts as a cross-linguistic difference? • Whether a category is grammatical or lexical • Whether a category is obligatory or not • Whether a category is frequently or infrequently used in ordinary communication • How different ARE languages?