The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally
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.
Cite this
Susan Goldin-meadow A, Wing‐Chee So, Aslı Özyürek, Carolyn Mylander (2008). The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0710060105
@article{goldinmeadow2008the,
title = {The natural order of events: How speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally},
author = {A, Susan Goldin-meadow and So, Wing‐Chee and Özyürek, Aslı and Mylander, Carolyn},
year = {2008},
journal = {Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences},
doi = {10.1073/pnas.0710060105}
}Citations in this library
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