Codability and cost in the naming of motion events

Abstract

With the introduction of Talmy’s (1985; 2000) typology for the linguistic encoding of motion events, the domain of motion event cognition has emerged as particularly tractable for the empirical examination of linguistic relativity. The current paper contributes to this literature, focusing on the differential encoding of one aspect of a motion event – manner of motion – and the potential for cognitive differences related to its encoding. When describing motion events, speakers of satellite-framed languages, such as English, have been found to be more likely to encode manner information than are speakers of verb-framed languages, such as Spanish (SLOBIN 2004). Building on this finding, the current study asks whether English speakers also experience lower cognitive costs when accessing manner information than do Spanish speakers. Pushing the connection farther, the study includes a range of manners varying in codability, allowing for a replication of the cross-linguistic correlations between codability and cost as tested within each linguistic population. The findings from both the cross-language comparisons and the within-language comparisons demonstrate a clear connection between codability and cognitive cost, suggesting an influence of language on the thought processes of speakers as they encode the motion events they see.