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.

concepts; categorization; space; number Possessing a language is one of the central features that distinguishes humans from other species. Many people share the intuition that they think “in ” language, hence that the absence of language would, ipso facto, be the absence of thought. One compelling version of this self-reflection is Helen Keller’s (1955) report that her recognition of the signed symbol for ‘water’ triggered thought processes which had theretofore-- and consequently-- been utterly absent. Statements to the same or related effect come from the most diverse intellectual sources: “The limits of my language are the limits of my world ” (Wittgenstein, 1922]; and “The fact of the matter is that the 'real world ' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group” (Sapir, 1941, as cited in Whorf, 1956, p. 75). * We thank Jerry Fodor for a discussion of the semantics of raining, Ray Jackendoff for a discussion of phonology, as well as Dan Slobin and Dedre Gentner for their comments on this chapter. Much of our perspective derives from our collaborative work with

Languages vary in how they encode motion events. For example, English motion verbs often encode the manner of the motion while Spanish motion verbs encode the path.

Does language play a role in how people interpret and remember causal events? One source of variation in causal event descriptions is agentivity, such as the difference between “She broke the vase ” (agentive) vs. “The vase broke ” (non-agentive). In this paper, we examined English and Spanish speakers’ descriptions of intentional and accidental events, as well as their memory for the causal agents of these events. While both groups of speakers described intentional events using agentive language, English speakers described accidents using more agentive language than did Spanish speakers. Similarly, English and Spanish speakers remembered intentional agents equally well but diverged in their memory for accidental agents, with better accidental agent memory in English than in Spanish. Spanish-English bilingual descriptions and memory resembled that of Spanish monolinguals, both when tested in Spanish and in English. Further, to test the causal nature of linguistic context, we primed English speakers with either agentive or non-agentive language. English speakers who were exposed to agentive language remembered causal agents better than those exposed to non-agentive language. It appears that patterns of language use shape how people interpret and remember causal events.

Three experiments explore the hypothesis that due to linguistic and cultural factors, metaphor usage – or thinking in terms of what something is like – differs across cultures. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision task supported the hypothesis that perception of what something is like tends to be faster and more automatic in Latino participants than in Anglo participants. In Experiment 2, Anglo participants were less able to solve a problem framed metaphorically than Latino participants were. To ensure that a preference for metaphor is not applicable to all bilingual populations, we included bilingual Asian participants in Experiment 3. In this study, Latino participants rated arguments presented with metaphors as more persuasive than arguments that did not have metaphors, while the opposite pattern was found in Anglo and Asian participants. The findings from these three studies provide support for the hypothesis that the Latino preference for metaphor is real and pervasive. Implications in the domains of education and public health interventions are briefly noted. ii To Mom and Dad, for their love and support iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to acknowledge Professor Dov Cohen for the many conversations that grew