Emilia Tuuri, Tampere University
Anneli Pajunen, Tampere University
“Event segmentation is the process by which people parse a continuous stream of activity into meaningful events” (Zacks & Swallow 2007, emphasis ours). On the level of cognition, event segmentation somewhat consistently follows certain patterns: when asked to define event boundaries by pressing a button while watching a movie, participants with different backgrounds end up in very uniform judgments. Event segmentation is automatic and hierarchically structured. (Zacks & Swallow 2007.) On the level of language and encoding events, more variation arises.
Cross-linguistic variation in encoding events is widely documented, especially in the context of motion events (e.g. Bohnemeyer et al. 2007), but there is also variation within speakers of a single language, for example in factors such as granularity of description or accuracy in naming the event. Some of the variation depends on individual differences in visual perception that is known to be highly selective: we tend to pay attention to the details that are crucial in understanding the current situation (Baker & Levin 2015). Encoding also varies with respect to the situations that are described.
Elicitation with visual stimuli can be used to capture different levels of variation. We have used the video grid Trajectoire (Ishibashi et al. 2006) to collect event descriptions from 50 young adult native speakers of Finnish. The videos represent different kinds of actions and activities performed by actors. Most of the stimuli include motion events (e.g. a woman walks into a cave), others display for example manipulation of objects (e.g. a woman folds a dress) or static situations (e.g. a man lies on the lawn). The stimuli contain both bounded and unbounded events, which is an important factor with respect to event segmentation (Ji & Papafragou 2020).
In our talk, we discuss the 3185 descriptions of the 64 video events that include one moving or acting Figure (dismissing interactions at this point). The descriptions are analyzed from the point of view of language-internal variation in event segmentation and naming and assessed with respect to different cognitive factors that are involved in event cognition.
References
Baker, L. J. & Levin, D. T. 2015. The role of relational triggers in event perception. Cognition 136, 14–29.
Bohnemeyer, J., Enfield, N. J., Essegbey, J., Ibarretxe-Antuñano, I., Kita, S., Lüpke, F. & Ameka, F. K. 2007. Principles of event segmentation in language: The case of motion events. Language. 83(3), 495–532.
Ishibashi, M., Kopecka, A., & Vuillermet, M. 2006. Trajectoire: Matériel licit pour licitation des données linguistiques. Laboratoire Dynamique du Langage (CRNS/Université Lyon 2) – Fédération de Recherche en Typologie et Universaux Linguistiques, CRNS, France.
Ji, Y. & Papafragou, A. 2020. Midpoints, endpoints and the cognitive structure of events. Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. DOI: 10.1080/23273798.2020.1797839.
Zacks, J. M. & Swallow, K. M. 2007. Event segmentation. Current Directions in Psychological Science 16(2), 80–84.