Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Daily experiences are conceptualized as events involving multiple participants and their relations (i.e., thematic roles). When describing events, speakers often do not include all event participants involved. Here, we explore how underlying conceptual requirements and language-specific encoding options influence the content of event descriptions in speech and gesture in two typologically different languages (English, Turkish). Focusing on conceptually peripheral instruments whose status is highly debated, we manipulated the conceptual status of event participants by including events that ‘require' or ‘allow' otherwise syntactically optional instruments. Results showed that the require-allow distinction did not manifest uniformly in Turkish and English in speech, gesture, or when both modalities were considered. However, mention of highly optional event participants (e.g., allowed instruments) was affected by language-specific syntactic encoding options. We conclude that, under more naturalistic elicitation conditions, planning descriptions of instrument events is more heavily affected by language-specific encoding than conceptual prominence of the roles.