The Possession Paradigm: Unravelling the impact of cross-linguistic differences on language processing

Possession is a foundational concept for humans to express, and understanding its intricacies is crucial to piecing together how humans experience the world. However, although possession may be a universal in typological linguistics, it has not been researched under a psycholinguistic. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to ascertain whether two languages’ (Irish and English) different representations of possession can influence how speakers process possessive sentences. The data was collected using a picture-sentence matching task with reaction time acting as a proxy for processing and the psycholinguistic variable of note. The statistical analysis showed that Irish possessive sentences were processed quicker than English possessive sentences. It was concluded that this effect derives from the embodiment necessary to make sense of active English possessives in comparison to passive Irish possessives. This implies that embodiment plays a role in processing possessive...Show morePossession is a foundational concept for humans to express, and understanding its intricacies is crucial to piecing together how humans experience the world. However, although possession may be a universal in typological linguistics, it has not been researched under a psycholinguistic. Therefore, the main objective of this study is to ascertain whether two languages’ (Irish and English) different representations of possession can influence how speakers process possessive sentences. The data was collected using a picture-sentence matching task with reaction time acting as a proxy for processing and the psycholinguistic variable of note. The statistical analysis showed that Irish possessive sentences were processed quicker than English possessive sentences. It was concluded that this effect derives from the embodiment necessary to make sense of active English possessives in comparison to passive Irish possessives. This implies that embodiment plays a role in processing possessive sentences in Irish and English.Show less

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The Possession Paradigm: Unravelling the impact of cross-linguistic differences on language processing