Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The question of how and whether language influences thought is an important one in many of the cognitive sciences. Our work integrates linguistic analysis on lexical semantics with psychological work on memory. It is motivated by neoWhorfian question whether differences in language use will produce corresponding differences in nonlingusitic cognition. The research reported here asks how memory for familiar, unambiguous, "verb-sized" events presented on video might be influenced by an accompanying verb. Our verb choices of Path versus Manner Verbs were guided by cross-linguistic variation in which aspects of an event are highlighted by the verb. W e find a predicted interaction: the verb altered recognition memory of familiar, unambiguous events.