The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally (fwd link)

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The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent
events nonverbally

   1. Susan Goldin-Meadow*,†,
   2. Wing Chee So‡,
   3. Aslı Özyürek§,¶,‖, and
   4. Carolyn Mylander*

+Author Affiliations

   1.*Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5730 South Woodlawn
Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637;
   2.‡Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore, Republic of
Singapore 119077;
   3.§Department of Linguistics, Radboud University Nijmegen, 6525 HT Nijmegen,
The Netherlands;
   4.¶Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 6500 AH Nijmegen, The
Netherlands; and
   5.‖Department of Psychology, Koc University, 34450 Istanbul, Turkey


Abstract

To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are
not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their
predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two
nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture
without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an event with
pictures). We found that the word orders speakers used in their everyday speech
did not influence their nonverbal behavior. Surprisingly, speakers of all four
languages used the same order and on both nonverbal tasks. This order,
actor–patient–act, is analogous to the subject–object–verb pattern found in
many languages of the world and, importantly, in newly developing gestural
languages. The findings provide evidence for a natural order that we impose on
events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when
constructing language anew.

Access article link below:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/06/30/0710060105.abstract