The role of language in eye-witness memory: Remembering who did it in English and Japanese

The role of language in eye-witness memory: Remembering who did it in English and Japanese Caitlin M. Fausey (cmfausey@stanford.edu) Bria L. Long (bria@stanford.edu) Lera Boroditsky (lera@stanford.edu) Department of Psychology, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg 420 Stanford, CA 94305 USA Abstract 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 Japanese speakers’ descriptions of intentional and accidental events, as well as their memory for the causal agents of these events. While both groups of speakers used agentive language to describe intentional events, English speakers described accidents using more agentive language than did Japanese speakers. Similarly, English and Japanese speakers remembered intentional agents equally well but diverged in their memory for accidental agents, with better accidental agent memory in English than in Japanese. These results extend recent findings from a similar paradigm examining causal agent language and cognition in speakers of English and Spanish (Fausey & Boroditsky, submitted). It appears that patterns of language use shape how people interpret and remember causal events. Introduction During President Obama’s recent swearing-in ceremony, the delivery and repetition of the presidential oath deviated from protocol so much that a do-over was carried out the next day. According to one journalist’s account of the errors, “The main problem was that the word ‘faithfully’ had floated upstream in the constitutional text” (Liptak, 2009). To English ears, such non-agentive language sounds evasive. Agentive language like “Chief Justice Roberts misplaced a word in the oath” (Zeleny, 2009), sounds more like a typical English description, even for accidental events. Is this preference for agentive accident descriptions universal across languages? If not, do non-linguistic patterns of causal cognition also vary across speakers of the world’s languages? In this paper, we examine causal language and cognition in speakers of English and Japanese. We find that speakers in each linguistic community talk about and remember intentional events in similar ways, but differ in how they talk about and remember accidental events. Our results contribute to a growing set of findings that suggest correspondences between patterns in causal language and in causal cognition. Language and event cognition. Recent research has provided clear evidence of cross-linguistic differences in how people think about colors (e.g., Roberson & Hanley, 2007; Winawer et al., 2007), space (e.g., Levinson, Kita, Haun & Rasch, 2002; McDonough, Choi, & Mandler, 2003), and objects (e.g., Boroditsky, Schmidt, & Phillips, 2003; Imai & Gentner, 1997; Lucy, 1992), among other domains. However, research on the role of language in event cognition, specifically the manner of motion, has provided mixed results (e.g., Billman & Krych, 1998; Gennari, Sloman, Malt & Fitch, 2002; Gentner & Loftus, 1979; Loftus & Palmer, 1974; Papafragou, Massey, & Gleitman, 2002). In this paper we examine the role of language in a different aspect of events: agentivity in causal events. The domain of causal events provides a rich testing ground for a specific linguistic relativity hypothesis: Talking about causal agents improves memory for causal agents. Linguistic descriptions can guide attention to the parts of events that are described and habitually talking about certain elements of events repeatedly directs attention to those elements. As a result, people may deploy attention in language-consistent ways even when they don’t overtly describe events (Boroditsky, Ham, & Ramscar, 2002; Slobin, 1996). In this paper, we examine whether people whose language environments include more agentive language remember causal agents better than people whose language environments include less agentive language. Causal agents in language and cognition: English and Spanish. In a recent investigation by Fausey and Boroditsky (submitted; henceforth referred to as F&B), English and Spanish speakers viewed videos of intentional and accidental events, were then tested on their memory for the agents of these events, and later described the events. Results revealed that English and Spanish speakers described intentional events similarly, using mostly agentive language. For accidental events, however, English speakers used more agentive language than Spanish speakers did. In Spanish, accidents were often described with non-agentive expressions using se, as in “Se rompio un huevo” (An egg cracked) and “Se abrio el paraguas” (The umbrella opened). Results from the non-linguistic memory task mirrored the patterns in language. English and Spanish speakers remembered the agents of intentional events equally well, but English speakers remembered the agents of accidents better than Spanish speakers did. In F&B’s second study, English speakers were primed with either agentive or non-agentive language and then attempted to remember causal agents. People who were exposed to agentive language in the separate priming task remembered agents better than those exposed to non- agentive language. These results suggest that patterns of