Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Is language production isolated from our experiences ofphysical events, or can physical motion affect the conceptualsaliency of the components of a to-be-described event, inways that affect its linguistic description? This studyexamined the influence of physical motion on theinterpretation and description of simple transitive events.More specifically, we investigated whether engagement innon-speech physical actions affects the relative location ofverbs versus arguments in sentence production, and therelative location and prominence of Agents, by testing nativespeakers of Truku, a language that allows flexibility in eachof these options and presents under-studied typologicalpatterns.