How grammaticized concepts shape event conceptualization in language production: Insights from linguistic analysis, eye tracking data, and memory performance

Abstract

The role of grammatical systems in profiling particular conceptual categories is used as a key in exploring questions concerning language specificity during the conceptualization phase in language production. This study focuses on the extent to which crosslinguistic differences in the concepts profiled by grammatical means in the domain of temporality (grammatical aspect) affect event conceptualization and distribution of attention when talking about motion events. The analyses, which cover native speakers of Standard Arabic, Czech, Dutch, English, German, Russian and Spanish, not only involve linguistic evidence, but also data from an eye tracking experiment and a memory test. The findings show that direction of attention to particular parts of motion events varies to some extent with the existence of grammaticized means to express imperfective/progressive aspect. Speakers of languages that do not have grammaticized aspect of this type are more likely to take a holistic view when talking about motion events and attend to as well as refer to endpoints of motion events, in contrast to speakers of aspect languages

Analyzing gaze allocation during language planning: a cross-linguistic study on dynamic events1

“…c r o s s -l i n g u i st i c c o n t r a st s a s a to o l i n t h e a na ly s i s o f g a z e a l l o c at i o n i n s e n t e n c e p r o d u c t i o n Cross-linguistic studies provide a particularly interesting basis for insights into patterns in attention allocation and their link to phases in language planning. Such studies show how attention patterns may vary in line with diff erent linguistic structures used by speakers of diff erent languages, and during what phases of the timecourse of the production process diff erences arise (see general overview in Brown-Schmidt & Konopka, 2008 ;Jaeger & Norcliff e, 2009 ;Papafragou, Hulbert, & Trueswell, 2008 ;Sauppe et al 2013 ;Soroli & Hickmann, 2010 ;v. Stutterheim, Andermann, Carroll, Flecken, & Schmiedtová, 2012).…”

The cross-linguistic processing of aspect – an eyetracking study on the time course of aspectual interpretation in Russian and German

“…Speakers of an aspect language such as Russian have to choose a verbal form which is imperfective or perfective, that is, there is a formal opposition between perfective (pv) and imperfective (ipv) verbs. This is different for speakers of a non-aspect language like German, which does not have grammatical means to express completedness or ongoingness of an event (see von Stutterheim, Andermann, Carroll, Flecken, & Schmiedtová, 2012). The present paper investigates in which way the grammatical system of a language interacts with the time course of semantic interpretation during online comprehension.…”

Language diversity and bilingual processing

“…German, Afrikaans and Swedish) tend to focus more on event endpoints. These differences have been found using a number of measures, such as attention allocation to different components of motion scenes, non-verbal recognition memory and non-verbal similarity judgements of motion video clip triads Flecken, von Stutterheim, and Carroll 2014;von Stutterheim et al 2012). With regard to the second question, more recent research shows that the degree to which bilinguals shift towards the cognitive patterns of one or the other language depends on the frequency with which they use their specific languages, the language of schooling in primary education, the amount of exposure to the second language and the language testing context (Bylund, Athanasopoulos, and Oostendorp 2013;Bylund and Athanasopoulos 2014;Athanasopoulos et al 2015).…”