Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In this work, we examine event unit formation in conceptual and linguistic event representations. Given typological differences in motion event encoding (satellite vs. verb-framed languages), we investigate to what extent cross-linguistic differences in the linguistic encoding and unit formation of motion events affect how speakers form cognitive event units in a non-linguistic task. We test English (satellite-framed language) and Turkish (verb-framed language) speakers on verbal and non-verbal event segmentation tasks. Our results show that when verbalizing information in the context of event unit formation based on visually presented input, and identifying event boundaries in a non-verbal task by means of a button press task, speakers do not rely on the same event representations. Therefore, we suggest a lack of a homology between conceptual and linguistic event representations in situations where speech planning is not required.