Figure - uploaded by Bhuvana Narasimhan
Content may be subject to copyright.
Source publication
When speakers describe motion events using different languages, they subsequently classify those events in language-specific ways (Gennari, Sloman, Malt & Fitch, 2002). Here we ask if bilingual speakers flexibly shift their event classification preferences based on the language in which they verbally encode those events. English–Spanish bilinguals...
Similar publications
This study examines the mental representation of clitic object pronouns in English L2 Spanish speakers of beginning, intermediate and advanced profi- ciencies. We present the results of a scalar grammaticality judgment task, which examines knowledge of clitic placement in both Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) verb constructions and non-ECM (finite an...
Citations
... The process of restructuring the cognitive system itself might be different for every learner. It depends on the learners' age of acquiring the L2 (Lai et al., 2013) or their L2 proficiency (Park, 2019). ...
p> This article discusses how Indonesian English Language Education Students (ELES) apply space lexicalization in narrative composition. This study also discusses how they understand the concept of space lexicalization. Fifteen master’s degree students in English Language Education are the subjects of this study. A convergent parallel mixed-method research design was utilized in this study. The data of this study are a set of tests on space lexicalization and a writing test. The test on space lexicalization is used to investigate the participants’ understanding of space lexicalization’s concept, while the writing test is utilized to investigate how they apply space lexicalization in narrative writing. The results show that the subjects understand the concept of space lexicalization and they can apply space lexicalization in narrative writing. This shows that Indonesian ELES has acquired space lexicalization in narrative writing, although some of them produce grammatical mistakes and incorrect combinations of spatial words. </p
... Interestingly, relativistic effects related to the conceptual domain of motion have not only been found in verbal behavior (as in thinkingfor-speaking effects) but also in non-linguistic tasks. For example, both Spanish monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals tested in Spanish are significantly more likely to judge the similarity of motion events based on the Path of motion, compared to both English monolinguals and English-Spanish bilinguals tested in English (Lai et al., 2014). Moreover, the effect is higher for late bilinguals than it is for early bilinguals. ...
We compare the motion lexicalization patterns produced by L1 and L2 speakers of Mapudungun, an indigenous minority language spoken in Chile and Argentina. According to previous descriptions, the patterns of motion expression in Mapudungun have some characteristics of an equipollently-framed language, which contrast with the usual motion expression in Spanish. The data comprise oral narratives of the picture storybook “Frog, where are you?”, collected from 10 Mapudungun native speakers and 9 Spanish native speakers who are late bilinguals of Mapudungun. We report the general results (comparison of total clauses, translational clauses, types, and tokens) and analyze three general conflation patterns: the encoding of the semantic components of Path and Manner, the conflation of various components into serial verb constructions, and the encoding of Ground. The results show that L2 speakers encoded a significantly lower proportion of Manner verbs and a higher proportion of Path verbs than L1 speakers, used a significantly less diverse inventory of Path and Manner verb types, a significantly lower number of motion serial verb constructions, and a significantly higher number of plus-Ground clauses than L1 speakers, suggesting cross-linguistic influence from Spanish.
... They found altered categorization preferences as a function of L2 use, exposure, or frequency of use in late bilinguals (Bylund, Athanasopoulos, & Oostendorp, 2013) and late multilinguals (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014). Lai, Garrido Rodriguez, & Narasimhan (2014) examined the effect of task language on the perception of motion in Spanish-English bilinguals using a similarity judgment task. Participants first watched a video clip of a motion event, listened to a description of the event, and repeated that description in one of their two languages. ...
... Literature suggests that early bilinguals may have heightened attention toward their environment language (e.g., Kuipers & Thierry, 2010). Specifically, in the motion event perception domain, Lai, Garrido Rodriguez, and Narasimhan (2014) found that (late) bilinguals oriented toward manner more when they used Spanish (verb-framed) language during the experiments, not when they used English (satellite-framed) language. Our findings suggest that in the case of Dutch-dominant early Turkish-Dutch bilinguals, the language of the instructions (and the testing environment more generally) might have enhanced the activation of Dutch, which happened to be beneficial for the task performance. ...
... Second, the weaker, less activated language drives attentional processing downstream. An intriguing possibility is that this second wave of attention is the correlate of behavioral differences, such as those found in motion event categorization (Lai, Garrido Rodriguez, & Narasimhan, 2014;Park, 2020) and visual attention allocation patterns (Flecken, Carroll, et al., 2015), in early cross-typological bilinguals. Clearly, more research is needed to confirm this possibility. ...
Languages differ in the way motion events are encoded. In satellite-framed languages, motion verbs typically encode manner, while in verb-framed languages, path. We investigated the ways in which satellite-framed Dutch and verb-framed Turkish co-determine one’s attention to motion events in early bilinguals. In an EEG oddball paradigm, Turkish–Dutch bilinguals ( n = 25) and Dutch controls ( n = 27) watched short video clips of motion events, followed by a still picture that matched the preceding video in four ways (oddball design: 10% full match, 10% manner match, 10% endpoint match, and 70% full mismatch). We found that both groups showed similar oddball P300 effects, associated with task-related attention. Group differences were revealed in a late positivity (LP): The endpoint-match elicited a larger LP than the manner-match in the bilinguals, which may reflect language-driven attention. Our results indicate that cross-linguistic manner encoding difference impacts attention at a later stage.
... Empirical evidence has demonstrated that learning a new language may bring about changes of the entire cognitive outlook, a process called conceptual transfer or cognitive restructuring (Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2008;Pavlenko, 2011). Studies to date have demonstrated that learning an L2 may give rise to the restructuring of L1-based categories, depending on various extra-linguistic factors, such as age of acquisition (Bylund, 2009;Lai et al., 2014), language proficiency Park, 2019), and audiovisual media exposure (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014. ...
... Moving beyond language use, it is questioned whether language-specific ways of speaking lead to particular ways of thinking. Some studies suggest that the L1-based thinking is stable and resistant to change (Aveledo & Athanasopoulos, 2016;Filipović, 2018), while others report changes in the conceptualization patterns as a result of bilingual experience Bylund & Jarvis, 2011;Kersten et al., 2010;Lai et al., 2014;Montero-Melis et al., 2016). For example, Kersten et al. (2010) examined how Spanish-English bilinguals classified novel events with a supervised learning paradigm. ...
... Following other well-established studies on thinking-for-speaking (Filipović, 2018;Lai et al., 2014;Montero-Melis et al., 2016), participants were instructed to move on to a subsequent categorization task right after the linguistic encoding. This was to maximally boost language involvement during cognitive processing. ...
Aims and objectives/purpose/research questions
Can learning additional languages affect what we perceive to be similar events? The current study explores the impact of learning a second language (L2) and a third language (L3) on how motion is categorized in functional Cantonese–English–Japanese multilinguals. Specifically, it examines the extent to which L1 speakers of Cantonese (equipollent-framed) with an L2-English (satellite-framed) and an L3-Japanese (verb-framed) restructure their lexicalization and conceptualization of voluntary motion through audiovisual media exposure to the target language.
Design/methodology/approach
A total of 150 participants were recruited and divided into five groups: three groups of monolinguals in Cantonese, English, and Japanese as well as Cantonese–English bilinguals and Cantonese–English–Japanese multilinguals. Participants were given a linguistic encoding task and a non-linguistic similarity judgement task.
Data and analysis
Mixed-effects modelling was used to compute participants’ encoding patterns and categorical preferences, as well as the correlation between audiovisual media exposure and the degree of cognitive restructuring.
Findings/conclusions
Multilinguals’ L1-based verbalization and categorization showed reverse transfer from both L2 and L3. The degree of cognitive restructuring was modulated by audiovisual media exposure to TV watching in English and Japanese.
Originality
This study extends the thinking-for-speaking hypothesis from bilingualism to multilingualism and explores the language–thought interface through reverse cross-linguistic influence. It focuses on how functional Cantonese–English–Japanese multilinguals with partially overlapping language systems encode and gauge similarity of voluntary motion in their L1, which is a rarely studied language combination.
Significance/implications
Looking at the cognitive effects of additional language learning can shed light on the mechanism of cognitive restructuring in the thinking-for-speaking perspective, and inform the language learning question of how learners integrate both linguistic and non-linguistic experience to recalibrate their cognitive dispositions when given sufficient multimodal input.
... Isolating the effects of any given neurodevelopmental disorder on language is fraught with difficulties, as many have a range of typical comorbidities that might also impact language skills. Autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) are associated with language impairments and comorbid disorders (Lai et al., 2014;Irvine et al., 2016;Eigsti et al., 2016;Vulchanova et al., 2015) which often, in their turn, impact language development. For instance, approximately 30% of children with ASD also have ADHD (Jang et al., 2013;van et al., 2013;Gillberg et al., 2016;Stevens et al., 2016;Stevens et al., 2016) or other types of neurodevelopmental disorders (Hansen et al., 2018). ...
Figurative and extended uses of language are nonliteral utterances such as irony, sarcasm, and idioms and comprise a core part of social interaction. Children with typical development (TD) show a progressive adultlike understanding of figurative language around the age of ten. In contrast, individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism spectrum disorder (ASD), attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or developmental language disorder often display difficulties with figurative language. However, these difficulties are a puzzle in that the actual underlying causes remain unclear. Those individuals who struggle with understanding figurative language need support through effective interventions. These should be based on solid research findings, which is often problematic as research in this field is characterized by conflicting and incomplete findings. The intention of this study is to conduct a literature review of both available studies and those intervention programs that seek to improve figurative language abilities in these atypical populations. This review will not only provide an overview of available intervention programs but also reveal the research gaps through critically appraising earlier studies. This is done as, in a manner of speaking, research reflects our theoretical understanding of the topic at hand, while interventions reflect the ways in which they are manifested into practice. This will serve to give the reader a more complete overview of the state of knowledge on figurative language and neurodevelopmental disorders. This article may be read for an overview of the field, but it also aims to point out the areas where additional research is needed. For instance, while figurative language takes many forms, there is a disproportionate scholarly focus on metaphors compared to other types. We will ultimately highlight promising approaches and make suggestions for future directions in terms of research and practice.
... Empirical evidence demonstrates that on the one hand, cross-linguistic differences in non-linguistic representations have been detected in various conceptual domains such as time (Boroditsky, Fuhrman, & McCormick, 2011;Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008), color (Athanasopoulos, 2009;Athanasopoulos, Damjanovic, Krajciova, & Sasaki, 2011), objects (Cook, Bassetti, Kasai, Sasaki, & Takahashi, 2006;Pavlenko & Malt, 2011) and motion (Ji & Hohenstein, 2018;Park, 2019); on the other, these effects are task-dependent and obtained in certain conditions. For example, the influence of language on cognitive processing is most likely to appear when language is explicitly used during on-line thinking (Filipovic, 2018;Montero-Melis, Jaeger, & Bylund, 2016;Trueswell & Papafragou, 2010), or when it is used as a strategy to solve a subsequent cognitive task (Lai, Rodriguez, & Narasimhan, 2014;Lupyan, 2012). However, such effects may disappear when the access to language is blocked by task manipulation (Gennari, Sloman, Malt, & Fitch, 2002;Montero-Melis & Bylund, 2017). ...
... This process is likely to be modulated by various predictors such as age of acquisition (Lai et al., 2014), language proficiency , and frequency of language use (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014a). ...
... In other words, frequent language use will strengthen the language-specific form-meaning associations whereas infrequent language use will weaken the associations. In addition, the degree of cognitive restructuring of languagespecific associations can be modulated by other extra-linguistic factors such as age of L2 acquisition (Athanasopoulos, 2009;Boroditsky, 2001;Lai et al., 2014), L2 proficiency Ji, 2017;Park & Ziegler, 2014), language context (Filipović, 2011;Montero-Melis et al., 2016) and length of immersion in an L2-speaking community (Cook et al., 2006;Daller, Treffers-Daller, & Furman, 2011;Park, 2019). ...
The current study explores how multilingual speakers with three typologically different languages (satellite-framed, verb-framed and equipollent-framed) encode and gauge event similarity in the domain of caused motion. Specifically, it addresses whether, and to what extent, the acquisition of an L2-English and an L3-Japanese reconstructs the lexicalization and conceptualization patterns established in the L1-Cantonese when the target language is actively involved in the decision-making process. Results show that multilingual speakers demonstrated an ongoing process of cognitive restructuring towards the target language (L3) in both linguistic encoding (event structures and semantic representations) and non-linguistic conceptualization (reaction time). And the degree of the restructuring is modulated by the amount of language contact with the L2 and L3. The study suggests that learning a language means internalizing a new way of thinking and provides positive evidence for L3-biased cognitive restructuring within the framework of thinking-for-speaking.
... Thinking for speaking does not concern the influence of language on non-linguistic cognition in general (see Bassetti & Cook, 2011 for discussion). Slobin's proposal is different from the linguistic determinism (i.e., strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) claim in that Slobin specifies how thought is to be shaped by languagespecific patterns during online language processing, whereas the linguistic determinism proposal allows thoughts to be invariably influenced by language, whether one is speaking or not (Lai, Rodriguez, & Narasimhan, 2014). ...
... The thinking for speaking proposal implies that thought can bring about languagespecific patterns during online processing only when language is involved, but not when language (i.e., speaking) is not involved. In this respect, Lai et al. (2014) in a forced similarity judgment test found that the classification of motion events by Spanish-English bilinguals was affected by the language (either Spanish or English) ...
... The theory of Linguistic Relativity suggests that people's understanding of the world is filtered through the language and linguistic practices of the culture(s) around them such that word choice, word availability in a language, and even the grammatical order of words can possibly affect how a situation is conceptualized (Whorf, 1956;Sapir, 1963;Pinker, 1994;Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips, 2003). Indeed, evidence shows that bilinguals have two sets of cultural-linguistic practices that can and do influence the way they process and talk about their perceptions (Li et al., 2004;Athanasopoulos et al., 2015;Lai, Rodriguez, & Narasimhan, 2014). ...
Adult-child interactions vary between cultures. For example, Hispanic parents are characterized by a more adult-centered style of interaction with children, while European American parents are more child-centered. Little is known about the influences cultural differences may have on the ways that Spanish-English bilingual parents speak to their children in each language. To address this question, 17 monolingual Spanish-speaking Hispanic American mothers, 22 monolingual English-speaking European American mothers, and 33 Spanish-English bilingual mothers were videorecorded in toy-play interactions with their children. The bilingual mothers and children were recorded in two sessions, one in which they were instructed to speak English and one in which they were instructed to speak Spanish. Using CHILDES programs, these interactions were transcribed and coded for properties of parent-child conversation known to be related to child language outcomes and hypothesized to reflect parent-centered and child-centered styles of interaction. The parent-child conversations of the two monolingual groups were compared in order to obtain baseline cultural differences in interaction style. The parent-child conversations of the bilingual mothers when speaking Spanish and when speaking English were compared in terms of the properties that showed differences between the monolingual groups. The conversations of the monolingual Hispanic American mothers were characterized by fewer maternal word types, and proportionately fewer maternal questions, and fewer child utterances than the conversations of the monolingual European American mothers. These differences were reflected in the comparisons of the bilingual mothers’ Spanish and English interactions with the exception of number of word types. The results are consistent with the hypotheses that (1) Spanish-speaking Hispanic American mothers use a more adult-centered style of interaction with their children compared to European American mothers, who use a more child-centered style of interacting with children and that (2) Hispanic American bilingual mothers reflect aspects of these cultural differences when speaking each language with their children.
... The conceptual changes bilinguals have are gradient and exhibit various forms, such as the co-existence of L1-and L2-based concepts (Hohenstein, Eisenberg, & Naigles, 2006;Sachs & Coley, 2006), convergence (Brown & Gullberg, 2013;Cook, Bassetti, Kasai, Sasaki, & Takahashi, 2006), shift to L2-based concepts (Athanasopoulos et al., 2015b;Park & Ziegler, 2014), and the attrition of L1-based concepts (Bylund, 2009;Bylund & Jarvis, 2011). The degree of cognitive restructuring may be modulated by various long-term learning effects, such as L2 proficiency (Ji, 2017;Park, 2019), age of L2 acquisition (Boroditsky, 2001;Lai, Rodriguez, & Narasimhan, 2014), and language contact (Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2014a. ...
... Another line of research suggests that the conceptualization patterns that bilinguals have are context-bound and susceptible to immediate experimental manipulations, such as linguistic priming (Lai et al., 2014;Montero-Melis et al., 2016), biased instruction (Brown & Gullberg, 2008;Kersten et al., 2010) and language context (Athanasopoulos et al., 2015a;Stocker & Berthele, 2019). For example, Athanasopoulos et al. (2015a) reported that German-English bilinguals switched between languagespecific categorization patterns as a function of language in operation. ...
... Turning to bilingual speakers, the key issue is how spatial concepts are mentally represented. Some studies have reported that event representations in bilinguals are context-bound and can be modulated by short-term language meditation (Athanasopoulos et al., 2015a;Lai et al., 2014;Montero-Melis et al., 2016). For example, Montero-Melis et al. (2016) examined whether recent L2 exposure affected similarity assessments of caused motion with Swedish adult learners of L2 Spanish. ...
Languages differ typologically in motion event encoding (Talmy, 2000). Furthermore, the cross-linguistic variations in lexicalization modulate cognition in a dynamic and task-dependent manner (Slobin, 1996a). This study aims to investigate whether early Cantonese–English bilinguals behave differently from monolinguals in each language when lexicalizing and categorizing voluntary motion in different language contexts. Specifically, monolinguals were instructed and narrated in their native languages. We assigned bilinguals to a monolingual and a bilingual context by manipulating immediate language use in their oral descriptions. Results from monolinguals suggested an effect of language on event conceptualization. However, results from bilinguals showed that their performances patterned with English monolinguals in both event lexicalization and conceptualization regardless of the language context. These findings indicate that early exposure to a second language has motivated speakers to converge to a single lexicalization pattern compatible for both languages. And the degree of convergence is modulated by the amount of language contact with each language. The study demonstrates that participants draw on their linguistic knowledge during the non-verbal task and provides evidence for L2-biased cognitive restructuring within the framework of thinking-for-speaking.
... In a number of studies in the motion domain, language mode is explicitly controlled for, in that participants had some small talk with the instructors in the target language (e.g., Brown & Gullberg, 2008;Lai, Rodriguez & Narasimhan, 2014), or were asked to do some additional activity in the target language such as counting prior to the experiment (e.g., Treffers-Daller & Tidball, 2015). The potential influence of language mode was addressed in some studies in that participants whose performances were examined in two different sessions were asked to show up for the second session after a break (e.g., Nicoladis, Rose & Foursha-Stevenson, 2010;Brown & Gullberg, 2011). ...
Juggling with structurally and semantically different language systems leads to constructions that differ from the typical patterns in a language. Typical patterns in the domain of motion are characterized by more verbs encoding path in French; and more verbs encoding the manner of motion in German. An increase of manner verbs in French, for instance, can be ascribed to an influence from German. The extent of typical or reversed patterns depends on interrelated factors such as speaker-related idiosyncrasies, language dominance configurations, and – arguably – the degree of language activation. Drawing on data from 154 French–German bilinguals who described motion events in different language modes, this paper combines interrelated questions on the role of language dominance, language mode manipulation and how these factors interact. Quantitative analyses on the use of motion verbs do not show the expected effects. The null results are discussed by comparing preceding studies showing contradictory findings.
