English and Spanish Speakers Remember Causal Agents Differently

Does language play a role in how people interpret and remember causal events? One source of variation in causal event descriptions is agentivity, such as the difference between “She broke the vase” (agentive) vs. “The vase broke” (non-agentive). In this paper, we examined English and Spanish speakers’ descriptions of intentional and accidental events, as well as their memory for the causal agents of these events. While both groups of speakers described intentional events using agentive language, English speakers described accidents using more agentive language than did Spanish speakers. Similarly, English and Spanish speakers remembered intentional agents equally well but diverged in their memory for accidental agents, with better accidental agent memory in English than in Spanish. Spanish-English bilingual descriptions and memory resembled that of Spanish monolinguals, both when tested in Spanish and in English. Further, to test the causal nature of linguistic context, we primed English speakers with either agentive or non-agentive language. English speakers who were exposed to agentive language remembered causal agents better than those exposed to non-agentive language. It appears that patterns of language use shape how people interpret and remember causal events.