Talmy's Manner in Event Perception : An eye-tracking approach to linguistic relativity

Abstract: This study uses eye-tracking equipment to search for effects of linguistic relativity. The study tries to escape the traditional battle between anti-relativistic modularism and pro-relativistic connectionism by testing effects of "distributed" linguistic relativity. It finds that Talmy's manner element has a perception-attracting quality which guides attention in unequal amounts due the different manner density in S- and V-languages. The attracting area is the manner's active zone in the figure. Furthermore, this change in attention makes way for differences in event memory. This was not directly proven in this study, but is suggested by indirect memory results.