The (Non)-linguistic Effects of Motion Event Typology

This study tests the hypothesis of linguistic relativity along two lines of research: a) how L2 learners of Chinese and English, respectively, syntactically package semantic components for caused motion (cause, manner, path) in an experimental situation in which they are asked to describe video clips showing caused motion events to an imagery addressee, and b) how monolingual native speakers of Chinese and English judge the similarity between caused motion scenes while viewing them. Our results regarding a) show that Chinese learners of English acclimate to the target pattern of organizing particularly dense caused motion information very rapidly, and English learners of Chinese also arrived at an inter–language showing considerable resemblance to the target system rather than traces of the L1 influence. Our findings regarding b) reveal that despite striking differences between Chinese and English in L1 motion descriptions, native speakers show an identical tendency to prefer the path–match alternate over the manner– match alternate. Overall, these observations suggest that language–specific constraints can be largely shaken off when encoding caused motion in a non– native language, and linguistic and non-linguistic representations of caused motion may be dissociable from each other.