Investigating the Linguistic Relativity in a breaking Continuous Flash Suppression study: language-specific evidence in motion event cognition among Mandarin Chinese speakers, English speakers, and Chinese L2 English learners

The current study explores the language-specific effects predicted by the linguistic relativity (LRH, Whorf, 1956) in motion event cognition among monolingual Chinese and English speakers, and Chinese learners of English. Three non-verbal experiments were conducted: a breaking Continuous Flash suppression (b-CFS) paradigm, a self-paced video-video (VV) verification, and a self-paced sentence-video (SV) verification task. The major linguistic difference between Chinese (equipollently-framed language) and English (satellite-framed language) in expressing motion event is the manner and path. For example, in ‘man carrying suitcase into room’, English uses the main verb (carry) and its subordinate satellite element (into) to express those two components respectively (Talmy, 2000), whereas Mandarin Chinese conveys them by verbs with equal linguistic terms: carry and into bear the same linguistic feature (a ‘serial verb construction’, Chen & Guo, 2009). English speakers are expected to take different amounts of time when processing manner and path in all three experiments, while Chinese speakers should process them similarly, since both components carry equal weight. The results supported the majority of the predictions: in b-CFS, English speakers were significantly faster to process stimuli with manner manipulation, while Chinese speakers showed no such difference; in SV, similar results were obtained but the English speakers spent more time to process stimuli in the same condition (i.e., with manner manipulation); in VV, both language group exhibit distinct language-specific patterns, but only the Chinese group showed statistically significant results. Cognitive transfer (Jarvis & Pavlenko, 2010) was evident in the L2 learners examined in all three experiments. In sum, the current study supports the LRH by providing consistent cross-linguistic evidence of the conceptualisation of motion events in nonverbal experiments, even when conscious linguistic recruitment is not allowed.