Crosslinguistic differences (Ünal and Papafragou, 2016)

Question 1

Those who speak different languages…

This is shown in children as young as…

Answer 1

Attend to different aspects of the world in line with how their language encodes aspects of the environment
3/4yo

Question 2

What did Papafragou et al. (2008) find in English and Greek speakers?

Answer 2

English and Greek native speakers showed language-specific patterns of attention and differently allocated attention to aspects of motion events in line with how English and Greek encodes motion info

Question 3

How does language affect non-linguistic cognition? (2)

Answer 3

Through selectivity (language acts as a lens to selectively direct attention and highlight certain aspects of the environment)
Through augmentation of representational resources (language acts as a toolkit to enhance/enrich mental representations of the environment and encode, store, and manipulate representations more efficiently)

Question 4

What is deep-seated specialisation of the mind (Levinson, 2003)?
What does this explain?

Answer 4

Conceptual reorganisation that means those who speak different languages may become less sensitive to conceptual distinctions not captured by their language
Explains how language affects non-linguistic cognition through selectivity