Linguistic Impact on Social Action Comprehension

Much of our lives is social: meeting friends, discussing with colleagues, negotiating space on the bus. So, it is unsurprising that humans have adapted to recognize the social structure of events in the blink of an eye. Yet, we are susceptible to linguistic framing: We may think about the same event differently depending on whether it is described as `buying` or `selling`. For instance, a sentence such as Dan buys bananas triggers expectations to be integrated with visual cues, like a scene in which Dans buying is the construed event; Tom sells bananas, on the other hand, leads to an event construal of selling. But what are the processes through which linguistic framing influences how we think about events we see? Despite efforts in cognitive science, philosophy, and linguistics, answering the question of how the human brain integrates linguistic with non-linguistic information is an ongoing endeavor: We still do not know how, and through which neural mechanisms, language impacts visual event cognition. We propose experiments that will enable quantitative testing of cognitive theories on how language guides event construal during visual event processing. We ask: How are social event descriptions understood? What is the impact of language on role binding in dynamic events? What is the effect of language onto episodic memory? And finally, how do the answers to these questions inform our theories of the language-cognition interface? This project will allow us to build more precise and cognitively founded models of language connecting to event processing in the human mind. Our central method combines linguistic priming with two distinct measures: neural oscillations as recorded by EEG, to trace ongoing linguistic impacts on event processing, and recognition memory, to understand the event construals that result from the combination of linguistic frames priming a visual scene. These approaches are enabled by a cross-linguistic database built from judgments of how people understand social verbs, like `meet` or `hug`, in several possible grammatical forms in three languages: English, German, and Hungarian. Despite much progress, previous approaches to this debate commonly confounded differences in language with differences in culture, or measured late behavior to make inferences about early perception. This project, in contrast, overcomes these limitations through a combined within- and cross-linguistic approach that allows to detect both early and ongoing effects of linguistic framing. Our approach has the potential to thrust forward a growing new wave of research linking language within broader cognition.

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