| title | Perceiving and conceptualizing events across languages: insights into cognitive and linguistic diversity |
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| start_date | 2024/04/12 |
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| schedule | 14h-16h |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | Espace Marc Bloch & hybride |
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| summary | In recent decades, numerous efforts have been made to establish connections between language use and the cognitive mechanisms that underlie event perception and conceptualization (Barsalou, 2008; Lupyan & Clark, 2015). Within the domains of spatial cognition and visual perception, psychological research suggests that visual scanning, and particularly spatial processing, are influenced by both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms (Wolfe & Horowitz, 2017; Chun & Jiang, 1998; Gazzaniga, Ivry & Mangun, 2013) –the former guided by low-level salience processing, while the latter based on higher-level control that depends on factors such as working memory, task demands, and the acquired semantic schemata (Lakoff, 1987; Talmy, 1985).
Regarding the semantic schemata involved in the processing of motion events, it has been proposed that the languages of the world vary greatly in how they integrate the ‘core schema’ of an event (Path) and aspects of the co-event that hold particular supplementary relations to the framing event (e.g., adding information about the Manner of motion). Depending on their lexicalization strategy, the languages fall into different typological categories (Talmy, 2000): (a) in Verb-framed languages (e.g., French) speakers tend to privilege the expression of the ‘core schema’ in the main verb, leaving the co-event in the periphery of the sentence; (b) in Satellite-framed languages (e.g., English, Russian), the core schema is jointly expressed with the co-event in construals that lexicalize Manner and leave Path in the periphery; and (c) in Hybrid or Parallel systems of conflation (e.g., Greek) speakers opt for both strategies equally frequently.
Many studies suggest that such language differences are only surface differences that cannot (or only momentarily) influence the cognitive processing of events (Pinker, 1998; Papafragou & Selimis, 2010). Others support that such linguistic variability extends beyond verbal tasks to non-verbal behaviors (Boroditsky, 2012; Soroli, 2012; Flecken, Athanasopoulos, Kuipers & Thierry, 2015; Soroli & Verkerk, 2017; Soroli, Hickmann & Hendriks, 2019; Soroli 2024) such as similarity judgements, recognition and memory, or even influences low-level visual processing mechanisms (visual attention).
The studies discussed in this presentation investigate whether typological differences, together with other factors (e.g., component salience, event types variation, acquisitional contexts), guide speakers from different linguistic backgrounds (English, French, Greek, Russian) in processing events differently. Additionally, the studies discussed examine how some non-verbal behaviors (e.g., variation in visual processing, in decision making) may serve as indicators of linguistic variability.
This talk adopts a two-way approach to the Language-Cognition debate, focusing not only on how language interacts with non-verbal cognition but also on how different cognitive measures can provide evidence regarding the degree of typological variability of a language system. |
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| responsibles | Coupé |
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Workflow history| from state (1) | to state | comment | date |
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| submitted | published | | 2024/04/04 12:43 UTC |
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