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Journal Article

The natural order of events: how speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally

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Ozyurek,  Asli
Neurobiology of Language Group, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Language in our Hands: Sign and Gesture, MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;
Language in Action , MPI for Psycholinguistics, Max Planck Society;

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GoldinMeadow_2008_natural.pdf
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GoldinMeadow_2008_naturalSuppl.pdf
(Supplementary material), 42KB

Citation

Goldin-Meadow, S., Chee So, W., Ozyurek, A., & Mylander, C. (2008). The natural order of events: how speakers of different languages represent events nonverbally. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 105(27), 9163-9168. doi:10.1073/pnas.0710060105.


Cite as: https://hdl.handle.net/11858/00-001M-0000-0013-2053-2
Abstract
To test whether the language we speak influences our behavior even when we are not speaking, we asked speakers of four languages differing in their predominant word orders (English, Turkish, Spanish, and Chinese) to perform two nonverbal tasks: a communicative task (describing an event by using gesture without speech) and a noncommunicative task (reconstructing an event with pictures). We found that the word orders speakers used in their everyday speech did not influence their nonverbal behavior. Surprisingly, speakers of all four languages used the same order and on both nonverbal tasks. This order, actor–patient–act, is analogous to the subject–object–verb pattern found in many languages of the world and, importantly, in newly developing gestural languages. The findings provide evidence for a natural order that we impose on events when describing and reconstructing them nonverbally and exploit when constructing language anew.