Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Languages differ in the way they convey paths. S-languagesconveying manner of motion directly in a main verb, while V-languages require a separate verb. This difference has beenshown to influence the conceptualization and narration ofmotion events. We therefore asked: would this difference arisein the paths that people draw, particularly in visual narratives?We annotated the representations of path information (source,trajectory, goal) in a corpus of 35 comics from S- and V-languages. We found that panels from S-languages depicted thepath of an action more often than those from V-languages,consistent with previous research on increased motion eventsalience for S-languages. These findings suggest that theconceptualization of paths from spoken language mayinfluence the graphic depiction of paths.