Panos Athanasopoulos's research while affiliated with Stellenbosch University and other places

... For instance, Athanasopoulos (2007) finds that with regard to behaviours related to plural marking, Japanese speakers with an advanced knowledge of English behave more like monolingual English speakers, while Japanese speakers who have only an intermediate level of English behave like monolingual speakers of Japanese. For similar behavioural effects of other linguistic features in bilingual individuals, see Kousta et al. (2008), Athanasopoulos (2009), and Kurinski and Sera (2011); for an overview, see Athanasopoulos and Aveledo (2012). There is also evidence on the specific case of future tense and intertemporal choice. ...

... primarily by showing that grammatical gender of nonhuman nouns prompt speakers of gendered languages to rely on gender stereotypes in the way they conceptualize these entities (Boroditsky & Schmidt, 2000;Semenuks et al., 2017). Thus, it appears that despite the arbitrariness of the gender markers, they influence the genderrelated traits that are ascribed to nonhuman entities by leading individuals to selectively attend to an object's masculine or feminine qualities through associative learning, and these processes occur nonconsciously (Boutonnet et al., 2012;Sato et al., 2020). ...

... In recent years, two aspects have received particular attention; on the one hand, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [5], also known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis (for reviews, see [6][7][8]), predicts that a speaker's language, specifically the way in which this language 'carves up' and categorizes percepts, influences how those percepts are processed to start with. This has most extensively been studied in the domain of colour where an impressive body of evidence now exists suggesting that differing colour vocabularies in different languages are linked with different performance in colour perception, categorization and memory, both at the behavioural and neural levels [9,10]. ...

... By contrast, it could be that whether one agrees with the other statements (e.g., "Things pass from future to present to past" or "Time is moving in relation to us") depends on the particular spatial metaphor or temporal frame of reference currently being adopted. Such an idea would be compatible with claims in the psycholinguistic literature that such metaphors or frames of reference are both variable and malleable (Bylund et al., 2020;de la Fuente et al., 2014;Núñez & Cooperrider, 2013). ...

... A common interpretation of such effects, by scientists and the general public alike, is that inanimate objects are conceptualized as gendered-that Spanish speakers, for example, "imagine a table as… having little skirts on its legs" (Garfield & Vuolo, 2014). Another possibility-arguably just as Whorfian, if less evocative-is that these effects are driven by the statistical association between grammatical gender and biological sex (Sato & Athanasopoulos, 2018;Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli, & Dworzynski, 2005). For Spanish speakers, tables may be judged similar to human females not because they are mentally imbued with stereotypically feminine features, but simply because mesa ('table') and nouns denoting females co-occur with the same gender markers (e.g., the feminine determiner la). ...

... Athanasopoulos et al. 2010;Roberson et al. 2005;Winawer et al. 2007), time perception (e.g. Bylund and Athanasopoulos 2017;Miles et al. 2011), motion encoding (e.g. Athanasopoulos et al. 2015), level of experienced emotionality (e.g. ...

... Research conducted in the past 25 years has demonstrated that language can have an effect on non-linguistic cognitive processes. For example, the availability (i.e., whether or not a language has a particular linguistic construction) and frequency of grammatical constructions, le ical items and metaphors in a speaker s language(s) have an effect on their color cognition (e.g., Roberson, Davies & Davidoff, 2000;Paramei, Griber & Mylonas, 2018), the conceptualizations of time (e.g., Boroditsky, 2001;Bylund & Athanasopoulos, 2017;Gu, Zheng & Swerts, 2019), assignment of gender (e.g., Sato & Athanasopoulos, 2018;Sato, Casaponsa & Athanasopoulos, in press;Sedlmeier, Tipandjan & Jänchen, 2016;Speed & Majid, 2019;Vigliocco, Vinson, Paganelli & Dworzynski, 2005), space (e.g., Levinson, 1996;Majid, Bowerman, Kita, Haun & Levinson, 2004) and number cognition (e.g., Athanasiadou & Athanasopoulos, 2017;Athanasopoulos, 2006;Everett & Madora, 2012;Frank, Everett, Fedorenko & Gibson, 2008;Gordon, 2004;Lucy and Gaskins, 2003;Pica, Lemer, Izard & Dehaene, 2004). The current paper contributes to this body of research by focusing on a previously unexplored link between language and cognition and presents two experiments testing whether cross-linguistic differences in the presence (English) or absence (Japanese) of compulsory number marking result in differences in adult speakers recall of number information from scenes seen an area of thought that has been previously shown to be at least to some extent resistant to Whorfian effects, as we explain below. ...

... This simple observation raises the question of whether linguistically based categorical distinctions can shape the way we conceptualize and perceive the world. Rooted in Whorf's principle of linguistic relativity (5), the idea that speakers of different languages perceive the world differently has been extensively debated over the past decade (e.g., 6,[7][8][9]. Existing empirical evidence indicates that one's native language may influence conscious psychophysical processing of verbally aided categorical distinctions (10), alter memory for fragrances (11), motion events (12)(13)(14) and facilitate perceptual discrimination of colours (15)(16)(17), and objects (18,19). ...

... One triplet comprised three similar smells co-presented with three different pseudowords. Following previous perceptual learning studies (Athanasopoulos & Albright, 2016;Vanek, 2019), each triplet was presented four times; twice in ABX and twice in BAX order. Every participant was trained on 96 triplets in total. ...

... While a connection between temporal focus and spacetime mappings has been attested in previous research along the three crucial levels of analysis, some questions then arise regarding the definition of a past-or future-focused culture (Athanasopoulos et al. 2017). For instance, a culture can be both past-focused socially and future-focused technologically and economically like contemporary China. ...