The effect of language mode on motion event descriptions in German–French bilinguals

Abstract

When describing motion in space, speakers of French and German are known to show different preferences. In French, the verb typically encodes the path, whereas in German the manner in which the figure moves is mapped onto the verb. In this paper, this difference between the two languages is investigated, drawing on the data produced by forty participants. All participants are multilinguals, with German and French as their two strongest languages. They described fifty video clips in two sessions, once in monolingual and once in bilingual mode. The critical stimuli were always described in German in both language modes, the fillers in German in monolingual mode but in French in bilingual mode. The analyses of the manner and path verb uses show that, in a bilingual mode, speakers significantly converge towards the French model, that is, they reduce the preference for manner verbs and increase the proportion of path verbs.

The roles of language mode and dominance in French–German bilinguals’ motion event descriptions

“…On the contrary, the use of German path verbs seemed to decrease with increasing French dominance. Given that this result is in line with similar findings reported in Berthele and Stocker (2016), evidence now suggests The effect of dominance on the probability of using a path verb is 1.05 log-odds for German and -0.30 for French.…”

“…Contrary to the prediction concerning the influence of the French pattern of using more path verbs (H2a), there is a slight increase of proportion of German path verbs with increasing German dominance. This counterintuitive finding of greater use of path verb with increasing German dominance, replicates Berthele and Stocker's (2016) findings.…”

“…The present study is an extended follow-up to previous investigations (Berthele, 2017;Berthele & Stocker, 2016). In these studies, we found effects of language dominance and language mode on French and German descriptions of motion events.…”

“…In a follow-up study (Berthele & Stocker, 2016), the language mode as a predictor was added. The same stimuli and dominance assessment tools as in Berthele (2017) were used.…”

Interpreting meaning in police interviews: Applied Language Typology in a Forensic Linguistics context

“…From a theoretical perspective, our results contribute to other studies applying typology to translation (Slobin 1996b, 2005, Ibarretxe-Antuñano 2003, Cifuentes-Férez 2006, Ibarretxe-Antuñano and Filipović 2013 and in particular to forensic linguistic contexts (Filipović 2007b, Rojo and Cifuentes-Férez 2017. In a broader sense, these results also contribute to studies on motion events and the bilingual mind (Filipović 2010a, 2010b, 2011, Filipović and Geva 2012, Ellis and Cadierno 2009, Han and Cadierno 2010, Cadierno 2017, Goschler 2013, Berthele and Stocker 2016 Interpreting meaning in police interviews: Applied Language Typology in a Forensic Linguistics context…”