Matched or moved? Asymmetry in high- and low-level visual processing of motion events

Abstract

Consensus on the extent to which cross-linguistic differences affect event cognition is currently absent. This is partly because cognitive influences of language have rarely been examined within speakers of different languages in tasks that manipulate the level of visual processing. This study presents a novel combination of a high-level approach upregulating the involvement of language, namely self-paced sentence-video verification, and a low-level visual detection method without language use, namely breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) (Yang et al., 2014). The results point to cross-linguistic effects on event cognition by revealing variations in visual processing patterns of manner and path by English versus Mandarin Chinese speakers. Language specificity was found on both levels of processing. An asymmetry in response speed across tasks highlights an important difference between facilitation of detecting contrasts when recruitment of verbal labels is automatic, versus facilitation of verifying correspondences when labels are overt.