Language and Ontological Knowledge: The Contrast between Objects and Events Made by Spanish and English Speakers

Processingserandestarto locate objects and events

“…Participants provided grammaticality judgments on correct (object + estar ; event + ser ) and incorrect (object + ser ; event + estar ) sentences while their brain activity was recorded. In line with previous studies (Leone-Fernández, Molinaro, Carreiras, & Barber, 2012; Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999), the results of the grammaticality judgment for the native speakers showed that participants correctly accepted object + estar and event + ser constructions. In addition, while ‘object + ser ’ constructions were considered grossly ungrammatical, ‘event + estar ’ combinations were perceived as unacceptable to a lesser degree.…”

“…They also were significantly more accurate rejecting the ungrammatical ‘object+ ser ’ than the ungrammatical ‘event+ estar ’ constructions, confirming the strong ungrammaticality of the ‘object+ ser ’ condition compared to the less strong violation in the ‘event+ estar’ condition (Sera et al, 1999). The result is also in line with previous experimental findings testing locative constructions in monolingual Spanish speakers (Sera et al, 1999; Leone-Fernández et al, 2012), and suggests that native Spanish speakers are more likely to accept an event noun followed by the copula estar in locative constructions than an object noun followed by ser . In contrast to the native speakers, the behavioral results of the advanced and beginning learners seem to suggest that they have not acquired the use of the copula ser with event subjects; they accepted the correct locative constructions (‘event+ ser ’) at chance level and also accepted the incorrect ‘event+ estar ’ construction more than the native speakers.…”

Towards a cognitive foundation for knowledge representation

“…Other cross‐linguistic studies have shown evidence for colour categorization and colour language terms (Berlin & Kay, 1969), later found robust with a possible physiological explanation (Davidoff et al ., 1999) (Dani, Berinmo, English), for cultural categories of shame (Frank et al ., 2000) (Chinese, English), for counterfactual reasoning (Bloom, 1981) (Chinese, English), for spatial reasoning (Bowerman, 1996; Pederson et al ., 1998; Levinson et al ., 2002; Bowerman & Choi, 2003) (Mopan, Tzeltal, Yucatec, Totonac, Kilivila, Longgu, kgalagadi, Hailom, Arandic, Tamil, Belhare, Dutch and Japanese, Korean, English, Dutch), for gender systems (Boroditsky et al ., 2003) (Spanish, English, German) and for objects and events based on spatial characteristics (Sera et al ., 1999) (Spanish, English).…”

Information about the logical structure of a category affects generalization

“…Thus, in Experiment 3 we tried to extend the design of Experiments 1 and 2 using realistic materials. A complication of such a design is that there may be cultural differences in people's ontological knowledge that could correspondingly affect the categorization process (Sera, Gathje, & Pintado, 1999; but see Lopez, Atran, Coley, Medin, & Smith, 1997). For Experiment 3, our only assumption is that the influence of general knowledge on how participants represented the stimuli would be analogous, because all our participants (in that experiment) came from a relatively homogenous population: they were all undergraduate students at the same university.…”