Research Colloquium this Friday: Victoria Hasko

The Dynamics of the Interrelationship Between Language and Thought in Processing Motion: What Eye Movements Can Show Us

• **Friday, March 31 **
• 12:30-1:30 p.m.
• Aderhold Hall Room G5

Does the language that we speak influence the way that we think, perceive reality, or remember certain aspects of it? The so-called “linguistic relativity” debate has been recently invigorated by a new generation of technology-assisted cross-linguistic and bilingual studies suggesting that both linguistic and non-linguistic cognitive behavior (attention, memory, etc.) are influenced by our native and additional languages. In her talk, Dr. Hasko analyzes the domain of motion to investigate the differences in how native speakers of English and Russian talk about motion and space and how they interrogate motion events visually and verbally. Her work is motivated by the evidence of significant acquisitional difficulties in the ability of English-speaking American learners of Russian to verbalize motion events in Russian in a native-like manner, suggesting resistance to cognitive restructuring. She utilized eye tracking technology and linguistic corpus research in her analysis. The presentation relates the findings to the debate about the dynamic interrelationship between language, language development, and human cognitive processing of motion. It contributes to the scarce research investigating linguistic relativity by utilizing eye tracking data, especially by comparing English and Russian as a rare contrasting pair in cognitive research.