this article. Address correspondence and reprint requests to Lera Boroditsky, Department of Psychology, Bldg. 420, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2130. E-mail to lera@psych. stanford.edu

This study investigated whether different lexicalization patterns of motion events in English and Spanish predict how speakers of these languages perform in non-linguistic tasks. Using 36 motion events, we compared English and Spanish speakers' linguistic descriptions to their performance on two non-linguistic tasks: recognition memory and similarity judgments. We investigated the effect of language processing on non-linguistic performance by varying the nature of the encoding before testing for recognition and similarity. Participants encoded the events while describing them verbally or not. No effect of language was obtained in the recognition memory task after either linguistic or non-linguistic encoding and in the similarity task after non-linguistic encoding. We did find a linguistic effect in the similarity task after verbal encoding, an effect that conformed to languagespecific patterns. Linguistic descriptions directed attention to certain aspects of the events later used to make a non-linguistic judgment. This suggests that linguistic and non-linguistic performance are dissociable, but language-specific regularities made available in the experimental context may mediate the speaker's performance in specific tasks.

INTRODUCTION Psycholinguistic research into language production---the process of translating thoughts into speech---has long been associated with connectionist models. Spreading activation models of lexical access in production represent some of the earliest applications of connectionist ideas to psycholinguistic data (e.g., Dell & Reich, 1977; Harley, 1984; MacKay, 1982; Stemberger, 1985). These models combined representations from linguistics with interactive activation principles and sought to explain speech errors, particularly errors resulting from multiple causes or processing levels. For example, "Lizst's second Hungarian restaurant " instead of "rhapsody " involves mistakenly using a word that is associatively, syntactically, and phonologically related to the intended word. Activation that spreads interactively among processing levels seems to be a natural way to account for these kinds of slips. Direct all correspondence to: Gar

The voluminous literature on linguistic relativity has concerned itself primarily with the search for influences of particular languages on nonlinguistic cognition in situations in which language is not being used, overtly or covertly. This represents a long tradition in which anthropologists, psychologists, and linguists have sought to relate grammatical and semantic systems of a language to the worldview or epistemology or culture of the community of speakers of the language. For example, Lucy has proposed a set of requirements for studies of linguistic relativity. He stipulates that such research “should assess the cognitive performance of individual speakers aside from explicitly verbal contexts and try to establish that any cognitive patterns that are detected also characterize everyday behavior outside of the assessment situation ” (Lucy, 1996, p. 48, emphasis added). In this view, “cognition ” is seen as a collection of concepts and procedures that come into play regardless of whether an individual is engaged in verbal behavior—speaking, listening, or verbal thinking. Such research is directed towards what Lucy calls “an independent cognitive interpretation of reality ” (Lucy, 2000, p. xii). A rather different approach to “cognition ” is provided by investigators who concern themselves with language use and cultural practice. For example, Gumperz and Levinson, introducing Rethinking linguistic relativity (1996, p. 8), underline the importance of “theories of use in context, ” including formal semantic theories (e.g., Discourse Representation Theory, Situation Semantics) and pragmatic theories (Relevance Theory, Gricean theories), along with research in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. In the present paper, I begin with the fact that human beings spend a large portion of their time in linguistic behavior of one sort or another—that is, we are creatures that are almost constantly involved in preparing, producing, and interpreting verbal messages. Accordingly, research on linguistic relativity is incomplete without attention to the cognitive processes that are brought to bear, online, in the course of using language.

Many languages have a grammatical gender system whereby all nouns are assigned a gender (most commonly feminine, masculine, or neuter). Two studies examined whether (1) the assignment of genders to nouns is truly arbitrary (as has been claimed), and (2) whether the grammatical genders assigned to nouns have semantic consequences. In the first study, English speakers intuitions about the genders of animals (but not artifacts) were found to correlate with the grammatical genders assigned to the names of these objects in Spanish and German. These findings suggest that the assignment of genders to nouns is not entirely arbitrary but may to some extent reflect the perceived masculine or feminine properties of the nouns referents. Results of the second study suggested that peoples ideas about the genders of objects are strongly influenced by the grammatical genders assigned to these objects in their native language. Spanish and German speakers memory for object--name pairs (e.g., apple--Patricia) was better for pairs where the gender of the proper name was congruent with the grammatical gender of the object name (in their native language), than when the two genders were incongruent.

Languages vary strikingly in how they encode motion events. In some languages (e.g. English), manner of motion is typically encoded within the verb, while direction of motion information appears in modifiers. In other languages (e.g. Greek), the verb usually encodes the direction of motion, while the manner information is often omitted, or encoded in modifiers. We designed two studies to investigate whether these language-specific patterns affect speakers' reasoning about motion. We compared the performance of English and Greek children and adults (a) in nonlinguistic (memory and categorization) tasks involving motion events, and (b) in their linguistic descriptions of these same motion events. Even though the two linguistic groups differed significantly in terms of their linguistic preferences, their performance in the nonlinguistic tasks was identical. More surprisingly, the linguistic descriptions given by subjects within language also failed to correlate consistently with their memory and categorization performance in the relevant regards. For the domain studied, these results are consistent with the view that conceptual development and organization are largely independent of language-specific labeling practices. The discussion emphasizes that the necessarily sketchy nature of language use assures that it will be at best a crude index of thought.

In this paper we provide a full overview of GikiCLEF, an evaluation contest (track) that was specifically designed to expose and investigate cultural and linguistic issues involved in multimedia collections and searching. In GikiCLEF, 50 topics were developed by a multilingual team with non-English users in mind. Answers should be found in Wikipedia, but not trivially, in the sense that the task should be difficult for human users as well. Crosslinguality was fostered and encouraged by the evaluation measures employed. We present the motivation and the organization process, the management system developed, dubbed SIGA, an overview of participation and results, concluding with what we have learned from the whole initiative.

Semantic substitution errors (e.g., saying “arm ” when “leg ” is intended) are among the most common types of errors occurring during spontaneous speech. It has been shown that grammatical gender of German target nouns is preserved in the errors (E. Marx, 1999). In 3 experiments, the authors explored different accounts of the grammatical gender preservation effect in German. In all experiments, semantic substitution errors were induced using a continuous naming paradigm. In Experiment 1, it was found that gender preservation disappeared when speakers produced bare nouns. Gender preservation was found when speakers produced phrases with determiners marked for gender (Experiment 2) but not when the produced determiners were not marked for gender (Experiment 3). These results are discussed in the context of models of lexical retrieval during production. Speaking involves the retrieval of lexical representations that correspond to our intentions and the development of a syntactically and morphophonologically well-formed frame for the sentence to be uttered. The development of such a frame is, in part, guided by syntactic information specific to each word, for example, its grammatical category, subcategorization requirements of verbs, and, for

A discussion of modularity in language production processes, with special emphasis on processes for retrieving words and building syntactic structures for a to-be-uttered sentence, is presented. The authors’ 1st goal was to assess the extent to which information processing is encapsulated between different processing stages. In particular, they assessed whether the input from one processing stage to the next is minimal and whether the flow of information in the system is strictly unidirectional. On the basis of the reviewed evidence, they conclude that both assumptions have to be revised. Their 2nd goal was to propose an alternative framework that does not assume strict encapsulation but that maintains multiple levels of integration for production. During the past 20 years a “great divide ” (as Boland & Cutler, 1996, p. 309, labeled it) has characterized the psycholinguistic world: Can the processes engaged during comprehension and production of language be conceived of as modular or not? Whereas a number of influential theories that do not assume a modular system have been put forward in the comprehension domain (e.g., MacDonald, Pearlmutter, & Seidenberg, 1994; Tabor

and discourse