The article by Papafragou et al. concludes that ”attention allocation during event perception is not affected by the perceiver’s native language; effects of language arise only when linguistic forms are recruited to achieve the task, such as when committing facts to memory.” Do you agree with the logic of the argument and conclusion? Why or why not? Or, which of the arguments do you find convincing and which require further investigation or a different approach?
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November 6, 2011 at 10:43 am
Yanjin Li
“the way events are inspected in the visual world depends on the perceivers’ goals: if perceivers are preparing to speak, then their attention is directed to linguistically relevant event components; otherwise,language-specific preferences for event encoding do not intrude into the ordinary processes of event apprehension.”(P.180)
The sentence exerted from the discussion section gave a further explanation about the final conclusion – attention allocation during event perception is not affected by the perceiver’s native language only if the perceiver needs to finish linguistic related tasks. Based on the methods and procedures conducted in this study, I think from the logical mapping, this study is plausible to draw the conclusion on behalf of native speakers of English and Greek. Nevertheless, the conclusion over generalized to native speakers of any kind of language is questionable. If the authors really want to widen their conclusion, they should invite participants with enough various native languages to cover all language systems, rather than just including two languages which share a lot of similarities. For example, both English and Greek are alphabetic languages, what about speakers of logographic languages like Chinese and Japanese? I think if the authors intend to come up with a general conclusion, they need to manipulate the same study across languages.
November 7, 2011 at 1:02 pm
William Mira
I have to say that I am more convinced by the finding that, when asked to describe the events they saw, participants focused more on the features that were necessary to describe the event in their language. This finding makes sense to me and the methodology used seems to be logical. However the finding that when observing an event “freely” all languages will allocate attention similarly seems questionable to me. The first thing that jumps out at me is the fact that participants were essentially told to memorize the images they saw. To me this completely invalidates their assertion that the participants were viewing the images “freely”. When you look at something you are not carefully studying it trying to memorize it. I also agree with Yanjin that this experiment can not be generalized to all languages.
November 7, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Jialing Wang
From Papafragou’s paper, I agree with his statement that attention allocation during event perception is not affected by the perceiver’s native language. Through the research, it shows that “the linguistic encoding of events does not appear to affect the moment-by-moment processes underlying event perception in situations where there is no need for linguistic communication”. I think this conclusion is related to or consistent with the Levelt’s model in the book “language and cognition in bilinguals and multilinguals”. When participants are asked to achieve some tasks, like in this paper they were asked to describe the video clips. In this task, participants in linguistic condition need produce languages. In terms of Levelt’s model, the process is non-selective in conceptualizer and preverbal message level of speech production. So it’s hard to detect attention allocation results from their native language. Until one of the activated lemmas (semantic cohort) is selected for production, language is selective that participants choose certain languages to describe the video clip. Then researchers can detect attention allocation and effect of language arise.