Monitoring sources of event memories: A cross-linguistic investigation

Abstract

a b s t r a c tWhen 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.

Interactions Between Language and Mental Representations

“…This conclusion converges with studies on motion summarized earlier in this article, showing that effects of language on cognitive processes are task dependent and do not always surface in ordinary contexts (Papafragou et al., ; Trueswell & Papafragou, ; see also Gennari et al., ; Papafragou & Selimis, ). This conclusion is also consistent with studies of the role of language in further domains, such as the object/substance distinction (Li, Dunham, & Carey, ), positional information in spatial scenes (Bosse & Papafragou, ), and source monitoring (Ünal, Pinto, Bunger, & Papafragou, ). Thus, available findings suggest that linguistic categories exert their influence on how speakers cognize the world in a flexible way.…”

Keeping the Result in Sight and Mind: General Cognitive Principles and Language‐Specific Influences in the Perception and Memory of Resultative Events

“…Perfective aspect in particular encodes event completion and highlights event end states, potentially leading to prominence in attentional processing of the relevant dimension, which in turn could lead to stronger general, that is, task-independent, cognitive saliency of event results and object end states. € Unal, Pinto, Bunger, and Papafragou (2016) investigate event memory in relation to verbal marking of evidentiality in Turkish, and the absence thereof in English. This study, however, does not report language-specific influences on memory.…”

How Children Identify Events from Visual Experience

“…One might hypothesize that Turkish-speaking children in our sample might have special sensitivity to the distinction between direct perception and indirect visual cues as a consequence of acquiring Turkish. Prior cross-linguistic comparisons provide preliminary evidence against such advantages for both child and adult speakers of languages with grammaticalized evidentiality (Papafragou, Li, Choi, & Han, 2007;Ünal, Pinto, Bunger, & Papafragou, 2016). Nevertheless, in Experiment 3 we tested this assumption more directly by testing English preschoolers with the current paradigm and stimuli.…”