Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1893/21795
Appears in Collections:Psychology Journal Articles
Peer Review Status: Refereed
Title: On the road to somewhere: Brain potentials reflect language effects on motion event perception
Author(s): Flecken, Monique
Athanasopoulos, Panos
Kuipers, Jan Rouke
Thierry, Guillaume
Contact Email: jk28@stir.ac.uk
Keywords: Linguistic relativity
Grammar
Grammatical aspect
Motion events
Event-related potentials
Attention
Issue Date: Aug-2015
Date Deposited: 21-May-2015
Citation: Flecken M, Athanasopoulos P, Kuipers JR & Thierry G (2015) On the road to somewhere: Brain potentials reflect language effects on motion event perception. Cognition, 141, pp. 41-51. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2015.04.006
Abstract: Recent studies have identified neural correlates of language effects on perception in static domains of experience such as colour and objects. The generalization of such effects to dynamic domains like motion events remains elusive. Here, we focus on grammatical differences between languages relevant for the description of motion events and their impact on visual scene perception. Two groups of native speakers of German or English were presented with animated videos featuring a dot travelling along a trajectory towards a geometrical shape (endpoint). English is a language with grammatical aspect in which attention is drawn to trajectory and endpoint of motion events equally. German, in contrast, is a non-aspect language which highlights endpoints. We tested the comparative perceptual saliency of trajectory and endpoint of motion events by presenting motion event animations (primes) followed by a picture symbolising the event (target): In 75% of trials, the animation was followed by a mismatching picture (both trajectory and endpoint were different); in 10% of trials, only the trajectory depicted in the picture matched the prime; in 10% of trials, only the endpoint matched the prime; and in 5% of trials both trajectory and endpoint were matching, which was the condition requiring a response from the participant. In Experiment 1 we recorded event-related brain potentials elicited by the picture in native speakers of German and native speakers of English. German participants exhibited a larger P3 wave in the endpoint match than the trajectory match condition, whereas English speakers showed no P3 amplitude difference between conditions. In Experiment 2 participants performed a behavioural motion matching task using the same stimuli as those used in Experiment 1. German and English participants did not differ in response times showing that motion event verbalisation cannot readily account for the difference in P3 amplitude found in the first experiment. We argue that, even in a non-verbal context, the grammatical properties of the native language and associated sentence-level patterns of event encoding influence motion event perception, such that attention is automatically drawn towards aspects highlighted by the grammar.
DOI Link: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.04.006
Rights: This article is available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). You may copy and distribute the article, create extracts, abstracts and new works from the article, alter and revise the article, text or data mine the article and otherwise reuse the article commercially (including reuse and/or resale of the article) without permission from Elsevier. You must give appropriate credit to the original work, together with a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI and a link to the Creative Commons user license above. You must indicate if any changes are made but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use of the work.
Licence URL(s): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Files in This Item:
File Description SizeFormat 
Flecken et al 2015.pdfFulltext - Published Version489.12 kBAdobe PDFView/Open



This item is protected by original copyright



A file in this item is licensed under a Creative Commons License Creative Commons

Items in the Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

The metadata of the records in the Repository are available under the CC0 public domain dedication: No Rights Reserved https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

If you believe that any material held in STORRE infringes copyright, please contact library@stir.ac.uk providing details and we will remove the Work from public display in STORRE and investigate your claim.