| Abstract: | Languages differ with respect to how aspects of motion events tend to be lexicalized. English typically conflates MOTION with MANNER, but Japanese and Spanish typically do not. We report a set of experiments that assessed the effect of this cross-linguistic difference on participants' decisions in a similarity-judgment task about scenes containing novel animations as stimuli. In Experiment 1, which required participants to encode the stimuli briefly into memory, we observed a language effect; in Experiment 2, which required participants to analyze the same stimuli, but not remember them, the language effect disappeared. Hence, these experiments reveal a task-dependent effect, which, we argue, points to working memory as the source of the language effect observed in Experiment 1 and, potentially, other experiments that have shown a linguistic relativity effect. |
