On the road to somewhere: Brain potentials reflect language effects on motion event perception

• DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2015.04.006
• Publication Date: 2015-04-29T03:00:38Z
• Authors: Monique Flecken; Panos Athanasopoulos; Jan Rouke Kuipers; Guillaume Thierry
• Keywords: Adult; Cross-Cultural Comparison; Male; Linguistics and Language; Linguistic relativity; Adolescent; Cognitive Neuroscience; 150; Motion Perception; Experimental and Cognitive Psychology; Motion events; Young Adult; 03 medical and health sciences; 0302 clinical medicine; Humans; Attention; EEG; Evoked Potentials; Language; Grammar; Grammatical aspect; Psycholinguistics; Cognitive neuroscience; 16. Peace & justice; 400; Female; English as a Foreign or Second Language; Psychomotor Performance; Event-related potentials

Recent studies have identified neural correlates of language effects on perception in static domains experience such as colour and objects. The generalization to dynamic like motion events remains elusive. Here, we focus grammatical differences between languages relevant for the description their impact visual scene perception. Two groups native speakers German or English were presented with animated videos featuring a dot travelling along trajectory towards geometrical shape (endpoint). is aspect which attention drawn endpoint equally. German, contrast, non-aspect highlights endpoints. We tested comparative perceptual saliency by presenting event animations (primes) followed picture symbolising (target): In 75% trials, animation was mismatching (both different); 10% only depicted matched prime; 5% trials both matching, condition requiring response from participant. Experiment 1 recorded event-related brain potentials elicited English. participants exhibited larger P3 wave match than condition, whereas showed no amplitude difference conditions. 2 performed behavioural matching task using same stimuli those used 1. did not differ times showing that verbalisation cannot readily account found first experiment. argue that, even non-verbal context, properties associated sentence-level patterns encoding influence perception, automatically aspects highlighted grammar.