Evidence against Whorfian effects in motion conceptualisation

Abstract

This research tested the linguistic relativity theory in relation to the conceptual domain of manner of motion. Nineteen English and 19 Italian native speakers completed two tasks involving the use of 26 triads of video-clips showing motion events. The participants underwent first a non-linguistic trial consisting of a forced-choice similarity judgement task performed during speech shadowing. Subsequently, they were asked to verbally describe the same stimulus material used for their similarity judgements. Congruently with the findings of Cardini (2008), an analysis of the verbal descriptions showed that English speakers provided much more information about the manner in which some motion occurs than Italian speakers. However, in contrast to the significant difference found across the two linguistic groups in the verbal task, the scores regarding the non-linguistic performances were close to identical: when visually attending to the motion events displayed in the video-clips, English and Italian speakers exhibited the same differential attention for manner vs. path of motion. The results of this study provide evidence against Whorfian effects on non-linguistic cognition.