Monitoring Sources of Event Memories: A Cross-Linguistic Investigation

Abstract

When monitoring the origins of their memories, people tend to mistakenly attribute memories generated from internal processes (e.g., imagination, visualization) to perception. Here, we ask whether speaking a language that obligatorily encodes the source of information might help prevent such errors. We compare speakers of English to speakers of Turkish, a language that obligatorily encodes information source (direct/perceptual vs. indirect/hearsay or inference) for past events. In our experiments, participants reported having seen events that they had only inferred from post-event visual evidence. In general, error rates were higher when visual evidence that gave rise to inferences was relatively close to direct visual evidence. Furthermore, errors persisted even when participants were asked to report the specific sources of their memories. Crucially, these error patterns were equivalent across language groups, suggesting that speaking a language that obligatorily encodes source of information does not increase sensitivity to the distinction between perception and inference in event memory.

Production–comprehension asymmetries and the acquisition of evidential morphology

“…Our results are also consistent with prior developmental studies showing that, when judging the knowledge state of others, young children often fail to consider others' informational access, despite the fact that they can gain knowledge from different types of information sources such as visual access or verbal report themselves (Pillow, 2002;Pillow & Anderson, 2006;Pillow et al, 2000; 3 Recent data from Turkish-speaking adults show that the use of the indirect past tense is sensitive to the 'distance' between the representation formed by partial visual cues vs. the full visual perception of an event (Ünal, Pinto, Bunger, & Papafragou, 2016). Future work should assess whether similar factors affect the use of past-tense morphology in Turkish-learning children.…”

The relation between language and mental state reasoning

“…However, experimental evidence with children and adults does not lend support to this possibility. Instead, both learners and mature speakers of languages with and without grammaticalized evidentiality perform similarly on nonlinguistic source-monitoring tasks (Papafragou et al, 2007;Ünal & Papafragou, submitted;Ünal et al, 2016). Furthermore, linguistic evidentiality is acquired later than conceptual representations of information sources by young learners (Ozturk & Papafragou, 2016;Papafragou et al, 2007), and both linguistic and conceptual 1 6 4 development in this domain seem to follow similar principles (Ozturk & Papafragou, 2016;Papafragou et al, 2007;Ünal & Papafragou, 2016b).…”

“…This question was directly examined in a set of experiments by Ünal, Pinto, Bunger, and Papafragou (2016). First, Ünal and colleagues confirmed the cross-linguistic differences in how Turkish and English speakers mark information sources using a linguistic task.…”

Relations Between Language and Cognition: Evidentiality and Sources of Knowledge

“…In another study, Turkish‐speaking 4‐year‐olds performed better than English and Chinese speakers of the same age in a flexible trust task, which required keeping track of two speakers’ accuracy in naming objects in order to be able to identify the speaker to be trusted when learning the name of a novel object (Lucas et al., ). Although one might be tempted to claim that these early successes in source monitoring could be driven by learning a language that encodes evidentiality obligatorily, these studies were subject to several limitations that challenge the validity of such claims (see Ünal, Pinto, Bunger, & Papafragou, ; Ünal & Papafragou, for detailed discussion). Most importantly for present purposes, these studies either did not directly compare source monitoring in learners of English and Turkish (Aksu‐Koç et al., ), or they did so in the absence of independent linguistic measures to confirm the role of evidential language—as opposed to other factors—in Turkish learners’ cognitive performance (Lucas et al., ).…”

“…Ünal et al. () addressed this question by comparing adult speakers of English and Turkish on a source memory paradigm. In a preliminary experiment, English‐ and Turkish‐speaking adults were presented with photographs that either directly showed an event (e.g., a woman wrapping a present, a woman blowing bubbles) or gave visual evidence that allowed the viewer to infer the event (e.g., a woman sitting next to a present, a woman standing next to bubbles traveling through the air) and were asked to describe the events.…”