Psycholinguistics

Satellite-framed languages and verb-framed languages differ in how they encode motion events. English encodes or lexicalizes Path in verb particles, prepositional phrases, or satellites associated with the main verb. In contrast, Turkish tends to encode Path in the main verb of a clause. When describing motion events, English speakers typically use verbs that convey information about manner rather than path, whereas Turkish speakers do the opposite. In this study, we investigated whether this crosslinguistic difference between English and Turkish influences how the speakers of these languages perform in a non-linguistic recognition memory task. In a video description task, English speakers used more manner verbs in the main verb of sentences than Turkish speakers did. In the recognition memory task, English speakers attended more strongly than Turkish speakers did to path of motion. English and Turkish speakers attended equally to manner of motion, however, providing no support for the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Research shows that bilingualism confers substantial cognitive benefits in children and the elderly. Bilingual advantages on nonverbal working memory, updating, shifting and inhibition tasks are widely reported. However, advantages are not always observed in young adults. These disparities may be due to varied proficiency levels and task types (verbal versus nonverbal) administered. This study sought to detect bilingual performance advantages on executive function and working memory tasks (verbal and nonverbal working memory, updating, shifting and inhibition tasks) between groups of 37 high and 37 low proficiency Spanish-English bilingual and 40 English monolingual young adults. ... Young adulthood may represent a lull during which bilingualism does not confer cognitive advantages for functions examined.

This experiment tested 3 to 5-year-old children's (n=18) abilities to learn a novel verb in the context of one or two novel objects. We showed the children claymation videos of novel creatures performing two novel actions. They were then tested on whether they could correctly identify the action that a creature was performing in the form of a 'yes' or 'no' response. Children in the blocked condition, who learned the verbs in the context of one creature, responded correctly more often (p=.01) than children in the grouped condition, who learned the verbs in the context of two creatures. Results were similar when tested again one week later. These findings suggest that when teaching young children verbs, it may be more effective to first teach in the context of one object so that the children have a more confident understanding of the verb meaning.