Department of Psychology, Education and Child Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DR, Rotterdam, the Netherlands.
Mem Cognit. 2023 May;51(4):982-996. doi: 10.3758/s13421-022-01371-6. Epub 2022 Nov 16.
The current study aims to explore the factors that could affect people's description of a motion event endpoint. The study conducted by Liao, Dijkstra, and Zwaan (2021, Language and Cognition, 13[2], 161-190) found that two non-linguistic factors (i.e., the actor's goal and the interlocutor's social status) affect people's choice between two Dutch directional prepositions (i.e., naar and richting) during event description tasks. The current study aims to extend these findings by examining the choice between a similar pair of directional prepositions in English (i.e., to and towards). Moreover, we aim to study whether grammatical aspect (i.e., the English simple present and the English progressive aspect) affects the sensitivity to the two non-linguistic factors and consequently also affects how people describe a motion event endpoint. In Experiment 1, we used the English simple present for all sentence stimuli (e.g., he walks (?) the trash bin). We found a significant effect of Interlocutor (the interlocutor's social status) on preposition choice, but no significant effect of Intention (the actor's goal). In Experiment 2, we replaced the English simple present with the English progressive aspect (e.g., he is walking (?) the trash bin). We found significant main effects of both Interlocutor and Intention on preposition choice. These findings extend those reported in Liao et al. (2021) Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 35(4), 498-520 in that protagonist intention and interlocutor status were found to indeed affect motion event endpoint description. The current findings furthermore show that grammatical aspect affects people's sensitivity to these factors, thus also affecting how a motion event endpoint is described.
当前的研究旨在探讨影响人们描述动作事件终点的因素。廖、戴克斯特拉和兹万（2021，《语言与认知》，13[2]，161-190）的研究发现，两个非语言因素（即演员的目标和对话者的社会地位）影响人们在描述事件任务中选择两个荷兰方向介词（即 naar 和 richting）。本研究旨在通过检验英语中类似的一对方向介词（即 to 和 towards）的选择来扩展这些发现。此外，我们旨在研究语法体（即英语一般现在时和英语进行体）是否会影响对这两个非语言因素的敏感性，进而影响人们如何描述动作事件的终点。在实验 1 中，我们对所有句子刺激物都使用了英语一般现在时（例如，he walks (?) the trash bin）。我们发现介词选择受对话者（对话者的社会地位）的显著影响，但不受意图（演员的目标）的显著影响。在实验 2 中，我们用英语进行体取代了英语一般现在时（例如，he is walking (?) the trash bin）。我们发现介词选择受对话者和意图的显著主效应。这些发现扩展了廖等人（2021）的报告，表明主角意图和对话者地位确实影响动作事件终点的描述。当前的发现还表明，语法体影响人们对这些因素的敏感性，从而也影响了动作事件终点的描述方式。
