Analogic/Analytic representations and cross-linguistic differences in thinking for speaking.

Comparisons of spontaneous speech-synchronized gestures for the same events by monolingual speakers of English and Spanish during narrations of a cartoon story show differences in the visuospatial cognition associated with the satellite-framed and verb-framed systems of motion event encoding. These are striking differences, given the potential for uniformity of space and motion representations across languages. 1. Objectively curvilinear paths are broken into straight-line segments in English—they are unbroken and remain curvilinear in Spanish. This visuospatial difference is apparent in children as young as three years old. 2. Borders are treated like other path sequences in English—they are given special treatment in Spanish that removes them from path schematizations. 3. Manner is projected onto the figure in both English and Spanish—it is also projected onto the ground in Spanish (a unique resource of visuospatial cognition in this language). From these contrasts we infer cross-linguistic differences in thinking for speaking, a real-time version of the linguistic relativity (Whorfian) hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]