Exploring motion event construal: How much attention do speakers of different languages and cultures pay to context?

Abstract

Cross-cultural psychology research has consistently shown that East Asians tend to display a holistic attentional bias and attend to the background context while Westerners show a tendency to attend to focal objects in relative isolation from their context. The present study sought to expand ongoing research on motion event construal by investigating how speakers of different languages and cultures (i.e., functionally monolingual speakers of English and Korean, and Korean-speaking learners of English) construe and describe motion events in relation to focal versus peripheral information. Our results demonstrated that American English monolinguals and Korean monolinguals differed in the amount of attention they give to focal versus peripheral information in their descriptions of motion events embedded in a story. Furthermore, Korean-speaking learners of English adhered to the Korean thinking style when describing events in English. Such findings appear to show that the scope of conceptual transfer extends beyond the encoding of manner, path, ongoingness, and endpoint reference to other types of motion event construal.