Le Abst For Booklet

Orthographically motivated spatial biases in the conceptual representation of events: Evidence from Arabic and English Dana Abdulrahim & Sally Rice University of Alberta [email protected], [email protected]

The present study is part of an ongoing research project that explores the possibility of culturally-based influences on cross-linguistic differences observed in the mental representation of events. Our task capitalized not only on the different writing system orientations of Arabic and English, but also on possible verbal Aktionsart (manner and degree of event realization) differences, by having participants from both languages group sentences they heard into different spatial categories. We found a significant main effect for writing system orientation, but none for verbal Aktionsart. Some current research in the cognitive sciences advances the idea that language and space map onto each other and, consequently, language may invoke spatial representations which are grounded in perception and action (Barsalou, 1999). Previous research on visual imagery (Richardson et al., 2001) has provided evidence that English speakers consistently assign UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT arrows to verbs that involve motion as well as non-motion (e.g. mental state) processes. Two lines of research in cognitive psychology attempt to account for the directional (particularly horizontal) biases that arise from such interactions between language and space: (1) the hemispheric specialization hypothesis (Chatterjee, 2001) which claims a predominance of LEFT-to-RIGHT directionality across human beings, and (2) the cultural hypothesis which assumes that other factors may well shape the speakers’ directional biases – namely writing system directionality (Maass and Russo, 2003). Along these lines, Rice and Borgwaldt (2006) investigated the presence and strength of spatial biases for verbs within sentential contexts among speakers of English (a LEFT-to-RIGHT writing system) and Arabic (a RIGHT-to-LEFT writing system). While speakers of English consistently categorized clauses/events such as The waiter pushed the cart as unfolding in a LEFT-to-RIGHT fashion, no strong reverse pattern (RIGHT-to-LEFT) was observed among Arabic speakers. Interestingly, however, the Arabic-speaking participants rated translation equivalents for clauses/events such as The woman dropped the knife on the floor as UP and events

such as The crane hoisted the container as DOWN. These “counterintuitive” ratings were assumed to be indicative of cross-linguistic differences in verbal Aktionsart. The study we report here modifies the previous research design to incorporate both writing direction and verbal Aktionsart––namely the degree to which an event is realized––as explanatory factors for spatial categorization biases. In our sentencecategorization task, speakers of English and Arabic were instructed to assign directionality (UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT) to a number of everyday clauses/events which involved motion as well as non-motion verbs. They simultaneously had to specify whether they construed the events as still in progress or as already completed. The significant main effect for writing system orientation, found here, provides more evidence to support the cultural hypothesis, in that the direction in which a writing system unfolds strongly determines the way in which events are construed as unfolding. However, the lack, at this point, of a main effect for verbal Aktionsart does not discourage us from modifying our methodology and designing future online experiments that specifically investigate this potential cross-linguistic difference.

References Barsalou, L. W. (1999). Perceptual symbol systems. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 22: 577-660. Chatterjee, A. (2001), Language and space: some interactions. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 5(2): 51-61. Maass, A. and A. Russo. (2003). Directional bias in the mental representation of spatial events: Nature or culture? Psychological Science, 14: 296-301. Rice, S. and S. Borgwaldt. (2006). Where do spatial associations come from and how language-specific are they? 8th Conceptual Structure, Discourse, and Language Conference, UC, San Diego, 3-5 November. Richardson, D., M. Spivey, S. Edelman, and A. Naples. (2001). “Language is spatial”: Experimental evidence for image schemas of concrete and abstract verbs. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, pp. 845–850. Mawhah, NJ: Erlbaum.