Differences in how english and german speakers talk and reason about CAUSE
Klettke, Bianca and Wolff, Phillip 2003, Differences in how english and german speakers talk and reason about CAUSE, in Proceedings of the Twenty-Fifth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Lawrence Erlbaum, Mahwah, N.J., pp. 675-680.
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Differences in how english and german speakers talk and reason about CAUSE
This research identifies how English and German speakers differ in the range of situations they describe as causal and how these difference may influence causal reasoning. In Experiments 1 and 2, English and German speakers described 3D animations of complex events using CAUSE verbs (cause, get) and ENABLE verbs (let, enable). As predicted, English speakers used CAUSE verbs to describe a wider range of events than German speakers. In Experiment 3, English and German speakers viewed 3D animations of CAUSE and ENABLE events and then estimated the likelihood of the effect (E) in the presence of the affector (A), p(E|A), in hypothetical situations similar to the one they just saw. Given the results of Experiments 1 and 2, we predicted that German speakers’ estimates of p(E|A) would be higher than English speakers’ estimates of p(E|A) for ENABLE events, but not necessarily for CAUSE events. The results were as predicted. The findings suggest that English and German speakers differ in the range of situations they describe as causal and that these differences in linguistic coding may lead to differences in causal reasoning.
Language
eng
Field of Research
170103 Educational Psychology
Socio Economic Objective
970117 Expanding Knowledge in Psychology and Cognitive Sciences
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