Impact of event description on event memory: A cross-linguistic study

Does the language one habitually speaks influence how one describes an event? English is an agentive language while Japanese is a comparatively non-agentive language, and past research found that English speakers usually use more agentive expressions to describe an event than Japanese speakers, particularly for the accidental event. This study examined how Japanese speakers, English speakers and highly proficient Japanese-English bilingual speakers describe the same event (including accidental and intentional events). The results showed a consistent pattern on event description of the two native groups when they were asked to use their native languages to describe the event; and the Japanese-English bilingual group exhibited the same pattern of results as the English-speaking group when they were asked to use English language to describe the same event, demonstrating a foreign language effect in cognitive processing. However, the patterns of results of the Japanese-English bilingual group are, in turns, consistent with their Japanese counterpart in a follow-up non-linguistic eye-witness memory test. Implications on how different languages shape our event perception and the foreign language effects will be discussed. Copyright © 2023 Psychonomics.