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

Susan Goldin-Meadow; Wing Chee So; Aslı Özyürek; Carolyn Mylander

doi:10.1073/pnas.0710060105

Edited by Rochel Gelman, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, NJ, and approved May 8, 2008 (received for review November 12, 2007)

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.

Footnotes

^†To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: sgm{at}uchicago.edu
Author contributions: S.G.-M. and A.Ö. designed research; W.C.S. and C.M. performed research; S.G.-M. and W.C.S. analyzed data; and S.G.-M. and A.Ö. wrote the paper.
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
This article is a PNAS Direct Submission.
↵ ** By having participants produce speech descriptions first, we recognize that we may be biasing them to use their speech orders in their gesture descriptions. The striking finding is that they did not.
This article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/0710060105/DCSupplemental.
↵ ** According to ref. 31, Chinese was originally an SOV language and became SVO; it is currently in the process of moving back to SOV and thus displays both orders.
↵ †† There were no ordering differences in vignettes portraying real vs. toy actors. In addition, actors preceded acts whether the actors were animate or inanimate, and preceded patients whether the patients were animate or inanimate, suggesting that participants' orders were based on the semantic roles, not animacy, of the entities involved.
↵ ‡‡ If we look only at two-gesture strings, which, of course, do not allow a “middle” response, we find that Turkish, Chinese, and Spanish participants produced gestures for endpoints about equally often before (51%, 56%, and 32%, respectively) and after (49%, 44%, and 68%, respectively) gestures for actions. English speakers placed endpoints before actions in 94% of their relevant two-gesture strings. Note that these gesture patterns do not conform to the typical pattern in speech for any of the groups: English speakers tend to place endpoints after actions, as do Chinese and Spanish speakers; Turkish speakers tend to place them before actions.
© 2008 by The National Academy of Sciences of the USA