The influence of language on memory and thinking about events

This research addresses the influence of language on memory for self-directed motion events, such as a person jogging across the street. These experiments examine how the choice of description (or no description) accompanying a motion event influences the person's representation of that event.;Experiments 1 and 2 showed that a spoken label highlighting the manner or path of a videotaped motion enhanced people's later recognition memory for the emphasized feature while lowering their detection of subtle changes in the other feature. Experiment 3 investigated whether speakers of different languages whose high-frequency verbs primarily emphasize one or another aspect of a motion event would show similar distortions in memory for action videos when they generated their own descriptions at encoding of the videotaped actions. However, examination of our Spanish and English speakers descriptions of the actions unexpectedly revealed little difference in their descriptions of the two aspects of the target motion events. Consequently, the Spanish and English speakers showed equivalent memory for subtle changes in the manner and path aspects of the target motions.;Experiment 4 examined whether Spanish versus English speakers' descriptions of an original action event would cause changes in which subtle variants of an original action would appear as more similar. The main finding was that English speakers who described the original action video in English (which typically specifies manner of motion in the verb) later selected the variant which kept the same manner feature to be more similar to the original than did the Spanish speakers who described it.;Thus Experiment 4 indicates some evidence for Slobin's hypothesis that the process of speaking biases the ways in which people think about events. However, this research disconfirms the Whorf hypothesis that English speakers and Spanish speakers think differently about the events in non-linguistic tasks. Language may play a more influential role in the process of reconstructing memory (as in Experiments 1 and 2) rather than at encoding (Experiments 3 and 4). This type of research on the interaction of language and thought is very important for understanding how people interpret and remember what they see.