Speech Production

Was Freud Right?

• Motley (1980)

• Bine foddy Fine body– male participants– more frequent error when experimenter

provocatively clad– more frequent when participants scored

higher on test of sexual anxiety

A more common model

• 3 levels– conceptualization– formulation:

• functional level• positional level

– articulation

• Almost all speech errors occur within 1 level‘stop beating your brick against a head wall!’

Conceptualization

• Connecting with semantic memory and the world

• Speaker: – conceives intention

– selects relevant information

• Product is preverbal message

Formulation:Functional level

• Builds grammatical “frame”• Content words (N, V, Adj) retrieved and assigned

grammatical functions• NOT lined up in order• No phonological information (just syntax &

semantics)• Grammatical affixes and function words exist as

features

Formulation:Positional Level

• Content words:– inserted into labeled (N,V,Adj) slots in frame– specified phonologically

• Frames contain function words & grammatical affixes (still not phonologically specified)

Articulation

• All sounds are specified

• Muscles are coordinated, and speech is produced!

Evidence for 2 levels of Formulation?Speech Errors!

• Word-exchange errors: (Functional Level)– Words of the same category– Long/Short-distance (even different sentences)

• I’m sending a brother to my e-mail (N-N, long-distance exchange)

• Phoneme-exchange errors: (Positional Level) – Between two content words– Phonetically similar (usually)– Short-distance (can be separated by function word)

• teep a kape (V-N, short-distance exchange)

Evidence for 2 levels of Formulation?Speech Errors!

• Functional Level:– Semantic substitution errors, same syntactic

category• on my knee (on my elbow)

• Positional Level: – Function words – don’t participate in phoneme

exchanges• lite wine for white line, but NOT luh thine for the line

Lexical Bias Effect

• Phoneme exchange errors create real words rather than non-words more often than you’d expect

• Darn Bore Barn Door (30%)• Dart Board Bart Doared (10%)

• Evidence for…– parallel activation?– monitoring?– both?

Crisscrossed (contralateral) Control

• “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth” (Psalm 137:5-6)

Left hemisphere (language) – right side of body / perceptual space

Right hemisphere – left side of body / perceptual space

- everything is “crossed” except for smell!

Language on the Left

• Tapping experiments: – shadow speech and tap with each

syllable– easier to tap with left finger than with

right

• Dichotic listening:– play different words to each ear– hear linguistic input better with right

ear

More “Language on the Left”• Recognize words better when flashed to right

visual field than left – (even in RL languages)

• Differentiate linguistically significant sounds (tones/length) better with right ear– left ear better at discriminating music (for non-

musicians)

STAIR ● CHAIR

صورة ● كرسي

Separating the two hemispheres

• Commisurotomy: severing the corpus callosum for severe, incurable epilepsy

• IQs tests: left hemisphere alone usually tests as intelligent as both hemispheres before the operation

• Left visual field: disconnected from language center

●

CLAP ● LAUGH(left half of their world has been disconnected

from their language center)

Right hemisphere and language• Word semantics (Beeman 1998)

– Processing relatedness of words, predicting meaning– Activates less-likely meanings of words weakly

• Understanding discourse, speaker’s intention– Interpreting narrative script, making inferences…

• Metaphor (Brownell 1988) – More blood flow to the right hemisphere when asked to

judge metaphor plausibility “The inventors were squirrels collecting nuts”

• Compensates for left hemisphere damage (esp. with children)– Smith and Sugar (1975) removed a boy’s left hemisphere at

5 years, 6 months. As an adult, normal language and intellectual capacities

Handedness and lateralization

• 90% of population: 1 or 2 copies of dominant gene causing strong Right-hand bias

• Lefties comprise about 9% of the worldwide population– 19%: language primarily in the right

hemisphere

• (The corpus callosum for left-handers and ambidextrous people is 11% larger)

Left Hemisphere

The anatomy of the brain

4 lobes:• Frontal• Parietal• Occipital• Temporal

Sylvian Fissure: Separates the Frontal and Parietal lobes from the Temporal lobe

Aphasia

• Aphasia – “a disorder of language, including a defect or loss of expressive (production) or receptive (comprehension) aspects of written or spoken language as a result of brain damage.” (Harley, 2001)

• Affects more than 1 million Americans, with 80,000 new cases acquired each year

3 main types of aphasia

• Broca’s aphasia: – agrammatic, non-fluent

• Wernicke’s aphasia:– anomic, fluent (usually retrieve real words that are

semantically empty. Patients are generally unaware that they’re ill)

• Conduction aphasia:– can’t repeat what they hear

• Dementia (not aphasia, but still affects language): usually fluent and grammatical, just nonsensical

Psycholinguistics and reading

• logographic systems: – high memory load, right hemisphere activity?

• syllabaries: – easy symbol-sound correspondence, abstract

symbols. longer words (mean > 2.1 syllables)

• alphabets: – if (ir)regular spelling, difficult to decode?

Reading is NOT innate!

• Children & non-readers have no natural desire to link word length with visual length!

–show children the words “two” and “toothbrush”, say the words to them, and they perform at chance, with no preference of matching the longer words with each other

How do we learn to read?

• Phonetically? (phonologically)– Easy with high letter-sound correspondences – Children 9-10 y.o. read better when taught

phonetically (in English)

– Intermediate readers read phonologically – Fluent readers read orthographically

where/wear, too/two

How do we learn to read?

• Direct Route? – Whole-word, “look and say” methods – Higher initial success

– But fluent readers have little difficulty in identifying words in unfamiliar forms

- AlTeRnAtInG cAsE

only slows word recognition by 10%

-Cmabridge e-mail forward

Developing phonological skills

• Phonological skills develop in stages:– First: segment syllables

• ma.ma / da.dy

– Then: separate onsets and rimes• cat / bat / mat / hat / rat • dad / did / do / dug / dinner / dog

– Finally: recognize individual phonemes• peach / speech speed / spud

Does your writing system shape your phonological development?

• Japanese children cannot initially segment words at the phonemic level (neither can literate Chinese adults)

• But English children can by 2nd Grade – Phonemic awareness develops because of

exposure to phonemic writing system

IS X a part of the body?

• Guy van Orden – Homophones• Task: judge whether words like ___ are… (e.g.

parts of the body): – FEAT / HARE

• Errors happen more often with infrequent words in a language. (less often with pairs like SUN / SON)

Conclusion: frequent words are accessed directly, but less frequent words are accessed through their sounds

Eye-tracking http://www.mpi.nl/world/tg/eye-tracking/eye-tracking.html

• fixation: the length of time the eye is focused on one spot (>200-250 ms)

• saccade: quick jumps between fixations, little or no information gained (25-30 ms)

• lengths of fixations influenced by: – word length, frequency, grammatical function (longer

fixations on verbs than nouns), predictability, overall complexity

Fun note: your eyes spend approximately 50 minutes/day jumping in

saccades, (Prof. David Erwin – UIUC)

Fixations

• In English, a fixation allows you to “see”: (2 or 3 + X + ~15) letters

that underlined l

underlined letter yo

letter your eye landed

• image on retina is fairly symmetrical around fixation point

that underlined letter yo

Size/Direction of saccades

• Length of saccade depends on script– In Chinese – 2 characters (2 whole words)– Japanese – 3.5 characters (syllables)– Hebrew – 5.5 characters (no vowels written)– English - 7 +/- 3 characters (vowels and consonants)

• In English, 85-90% of jumps are rightward– direction of saccades determined by language

Signed Languages

What are Signed Languages?

Independent Linguistic System

• Not based on spoken language

• Different Modality: Aural-Oral vs. Visual-Gestural/Manual

• Level of Iconicity: – Transparent-Translucent-Opaque

“Phonology”

• Phonemes once called “cheremes” in sign languages

• HOLME:– Handshape– Palm Orientation– Location (e.g. place of articulation)– Movement (e.g. manner of articulation)– Facial Expression (non-manual markers)

• Phonological Rules: Assimilation, Co-articulation etc.

Morphology/Syntax

• Morphology & Syntax– Lexical Categories: N, V, Adj…– Verbal Inflections – Pronouns: spatial points & direction– Word-Order: Topic-Comment, SVO, but much more flexible– Pro-drop!!

• Facial Expression– Part of Syntax:

Conditional: eyebrows raised; head tilted to side; shoulders slightly forward

Question: eyebrows furrowed; head tilted

Acquisition

• Babbling: hands – 7~10 months– Deaf babies babble with voice and hand, but

only one remains

• Bilingual signers: – 1st sign (6 mon.) >1st word (11-13 mon.)

• Parentese:– Simpler, Exaggerated in every aspect

Other issues:• In “Language Area” - LH

– Left Hemisphere Damage sign language aphasia; linguistic facial expressions impaired!

• Critical Period for Sign Language Acquisition– Nicaraguan Sign language (Judy Kegl)

• No education for deaf until 1986• Young children were adept at acquiring language

– Developed new gestures to communicate with each other

• After ages 7-10, children had difficulty learning• About 300 language-less adults raised in otherwise

healthy environments acquired vocabulary, but no syntax

Is “becoming the object” obligatory? (Quinto-

Pozos, 2006)

• Can signers avoid constructed action and tell stories using more abstract “linguistic” signs?– Participants watched video clips and narrated what

they saw– Researcher asked them to retell the story, removing

one communicative device (constructed action). • Signer’s mouth moving like a seal using hands to

indicate the seals’ mouth opening/closing

– Signers were unable to do so and often refused to try! (Just used the same signs, smaller!)

Sign language and reading

• Reminder: phonological awareness is crucial to reading skills (in English)

• Most deaf children show little phonological awareness– Lag considerably in reading skills– Good signing ≠ Good reading– Best way to improve reading: teach oral language

as early as possible

Phonological skills in deaf

• Frequent phonetic errors– Deaf children regularly omit consonants in spelling

(rare in hearing children)• PLA for “played”

– Deaf adults often make phonetically implausible errors

• MEDINCE for medicine and SUBITUSE for substitute

– Comparable in syllable segmentation?

• Good lip-readers, usually good phonology good readers!

Genetic Language Disorders

Specific Language Impairment (SLI)

• Definition: significant language impairment with no other developmental delays

• Diagnosed based on problems with: – verb morphology, nonword repetition, &

phoneme discrimination

• 6% of girls and 8% of boys have SLI– based on monolingual English-speaking classes– only 29% of cases had been previously

diagnosed (Tomblin et al., 1997)

SLI Vocabulary

• Vocabulary lags behind by 1 year– Age 2: no two-word phrases, < 15 words

• Slow word mappers (2x as many repetitions)

• But not all late talkers have SLI! – ½ to ¾ of late talkers catch up

• less likely to catch up with family history of speech & language delay

SLI Vocabulary

• More generic words (“thing”, “do”), slow with naming tasks, use circumlocutions– “something round and English” – for English muffin

• Can’t deal with ambiguous words - only have access to first meaning retrieved:– “The noise of the fans disturbed the boy”– labeling a fried egg as a brain

How do wugs gling the fripper? and SLI

This is a wug.

Now there is another one.

There are two of them.

There are two _____.

“Wug…wugness, isn’t it? No. I see. You wait to pair…pair it up. Ok.”

(zat): “Za…ka…za…zackle”

(zoop): “zoop-es”

(tob): “tob-ye-es”

SLI patients often fail the wug-test!

Mistakes they don’t make

• Patients with SLI still never substitute:– no for nose (but do substitute know for knows)– car for card

… deficits due to grammar, not sound

• Able to detect verb phrase violations: – The nice girl gives– The girl eats a cookie to the boy

… some grammatical knowledge retained

SLI Pragmatics

• literal interpretation“liar” refers to anyone who says anything inaccurate –

regardless of intent to deceive• trouble giving / understanding requests

“Your snack looks good”• “Yes – and it tastes good, too!”

“John, the children can’t see the board.”• “Oh, what’s wrong with their eyes?”

• trouble inferring emotional state, needs for information / clarificationMother: The cars come out when the bell rings?Troy: The telephone do that, too!

• less adept at entering/guiding conversations, narratives (e.g., Dumbo story)

• KE family - Identified a mutation in a gene that disrupts grammar: FOXP2

1st generation: grandmother

2nd generation: 4 impaired, 1 normal

3rd generation: 11 impaired, 12 normal; 0 impaired, 4 normal

• Randomly distributed among sexes and birth orders

• If FOXP2 disrupted in birds, “syntax” of birdsong impaired

KE Family, a genetic link (Gopnik, 1991)

Brain Imaging for SLI• fMRIs for Children with SLI (Jernigan et al., 1991)

– Broca’s area significantly smaller – Rightward asymmetry of language structures

• ERPs: deficits in acoustic analysis and phonological processing

Down Syndrome vs. Williams1) Down Syndrome, age 18, IQ 55

“The frog is in the jar. The jar is on the floor. The jar is on the floor. That’s it. The stool is broke. The clothes is laying there.”

2) Williams Syndrome, age 17, IQ 50“Once upon a time when it was dark at night…the boy

had a frog. The boy was looking at the frog…sitting on the chair, on the table, and the dog was looking through…looking up to the frog in a jar. That night, she sleeped and slept for a long time, the dog did. But the frog was not gonna go to sleep…” (Bellugi et al, 1999)

Analysis of Language Deficits• Abnormalities in the hippocampus and

cerebellum that affect…• Attentional capacity

– don’t attend to relevant stimuli in environment

• Information storage & retrieval mechanisms• Ability to generalize knowledge to new

situations• Depressed short-term and long-term memory –

especially for auditory stimuli– Williams Syndrome – good short-term memory

Owens (2002)

Language with Down syndrome

• Delay, not deviance (for 1st several years)!– Language skills follow normal path of development– Age 3 – 20 months behind– Age 4 – more than 2 years behind

• Auditory/verbal working memory skills predict success in language growth

• If strong visual memory can achieve literacy skills through whole word recognition

Language with Down Syndrome

• More delays in syntax than in vocabulary– Omit more function words than normal

children

• Comprehension of syntax impaired

• Comprehension & production abilities – closely matched

Stuttering

• Genetic component

• Usually appears when child is 2-4 y.o., often during stressful time

• May be language-specific – (occur in 1 language, but not another)

• Vocal cord tension unusually high

• May disappear when singing or talking in a “funny voice”

Theories of Stuttering

1) Right hemisphere has taken too much control over articulators

2) Faulty feedback between signal initiating articulation and feedback signal

3) Too much tension in the vocal cords (stress/tension directed there)

4) Mis-timing during the articulation process

Autismand Autism Spectrum Disorder

November 12, 2007

Definition

• Complex developmental disability

• Impairment in: – social reciprocity & communication– behavioral rigidity

• Usually diagnosed before 30 months– some symptoms evident in infancy

Characteristics of Autism– Insistence on sameness; resists change – Difficulty in expressing needs– Repetitive, not communicative language– Little or no eye contact – Prefers to be alone– Tantrums – May not want to cuddle or be touched – Laughing, crying, showing distress for

reasons not apparent to others – Inappropriate attachments to objects– Don’t succumb to visual illusions

Language-related development

• Joint attention, eye gaze– At 1st birthday, children later diagnosed with ASD

lacked: (Osterling & Dawson, 1994)

• pointing & showing activity• looking at faces of others• normal response to hearing name called

• Symbol use– Fail to develop symbolic play– Difficulty learning verbal labels for concepts– Trouble with waving & pointing

Language-Related Development• Theory of Mind:

– Understanding intentions and

mental states of others

• Impairments– don’t produce/understand mental state words (Tager-Flusberg, 1992,

Baron-Cohen et al., 1994)

– fail to make accidental-intentional distinction (Phillips, 1993)

– unable to deceive (Baron-Cohen, 1992)

– don’t understand intentionally non-literal statements (Happé, 1994)

– Causes impairment in vocabulary development!

• don’t follow speaker’s eye gaze when hear new word – scan own visual field

Language development• Delayed & deviant

• Don’t engage in prelinguistic conversation• Only half of autistic population develops

expressive language at all (Bailey, Phillips, & Rutter, 1996)

– Language success closely associated with IQ

• Narrow range of grammatical constructions – little use of questions, mental state verbs

• Impaired in nonsense word repetition

Language development• Echolalia

– immediate vs. delayed– often “mitigated” – not exact, with minor

changes in structure– indicates difficulty in comprehension

• Pronominal reversal – e.g. 'do you want a drink' instead of ‘I want a

drink'

• Use of '-ing'

– 'daddy piping', 'boy bubbling' (boy blowing bubbles) - 9 yr old autistic girl (Wing, 1976)

Prognosis

• Best predictors of success in language acquisition: (Toth et al., 2006)

– 3 - 4 y.o.• joint attention• immediate imitation of motor movements

– 4.5 - 6 y.o.• pretend play• deferred imitation of motor movements

• Intervention studies show preliminary success (Kasari et al., 2004)

Second Language Acquisition& Bilingualism

Bilingualism

• “The habitual, fluent, correct, and accent-free use of two languages” - Paradis

Simultaneous Bilinguals: 2 monolinguals in 1?

• Same language acquisition path as monolinguals

• No increase in acquisition speed when languages are more similar – English/French & English/Chinese – same speed!

…usually, one language is weaker than the other

Language Development

• Vocabulary spurt – same time as monolinguals

• Slower in mass/count distinction

• Grammatical gender lags behind – (Gathercole 2002b, English-speaking kids

learning Spanish)

Simultaneous Bilinguals: 2 monolinguals in 1?

• Fusion Hypothesis

unitary system for two languages

• Separate Development Hypothesis

languages develop autonomously

…usually, one language is weaker than the other

Sequential Bilinguals:

• Addition or Subtraction?potential to lose ability in first language (attrition)

• Factors involved– personality, cognitive attributes, proficiency in

L1 (*developing L1 actually develops L2)– 25% input, minimum (Spanish-English

bilinguals in Florida) – “Balanced” bilinguals

Separating Languages

• 1 person, 1 language– Many kids can successfully differentiate

languages by age 2! – “test” words in both languages

• Parents “mix”– Kids more likely to mix languages

• in phonology, syntax, lexicon• lexical mixing most frequent

– Mixing almost gone by 3;3

Competition between languages

• Words in different languages interfere with & facilitate each other

• Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (Costa, Miozzo, & Caramazza, 1999)

– Task: Name pictures in Catalan• Name of picture printed on top of picture

– in Spanish or Catalan

• If the word is printed in Spanish: facilitation or interference?

Competition between languages

• Words in different languages interfere with & facilitate each other

• Catalan-Spanish bilinguals (Costa, Miozzo, & Caramazza, 1999)

– Task: Name pictures in Catalan• Name of picture printed on top of picture

– in Spanish or Catalan

• If the word is printed in Spanish: facilitation or interference?

– FACILITATION! (Spanish words sped up Catalan naming!)

L1 vs. L2 acquisition differences (Field)

L2 acquisition• Less time for learning• Already cognitively developed• Responds to input analytically• Already has a 1st language• Has access to language of “explanation” – can

theoretically understand differences• Is accustomed to expressing personality in L1 (L2

can feel limiting)• Has world knowledge and social understanding in

L1

Language Transfer

• Why is it easier to acquire languages that are similar to each other?

• Knowledge of L1 grammar is used in L2 acquisition (L1-Transfer)– Positive Transfer (Facilitation)

• L1 & L2 are the same

– Negative Transfer (Interference)• L1 & L2 are different

Bilingualism and the Brain

Early vs. Late Bilinguals

Broca’s Area

• Early bilinguals: same patterns of activation in both languages

• Late bilinguals: L2 shows more scattered activation, slightly different areas

Wernicke’s Area: same

L1 L2

L1 L2

How late is too late?(Pallier et al., 2003)

• Korean French adoptees– ages 3-8– self-reports and behavioral tests indicate no knowledge of

Korean

• fMRI study– fragment detection tasks– French, Japanese (distracter), Korean (test), and Polish

(control)– no increased activation of Korean (compared to Polish)– overall, less neural activation than native French speakers– no difference (adoptees vs. French) with motor cortex

activation

Grammar and Age of AcquisitionWeber-Fox and Neville (1996)

• ERP responses to syntactic violations– P600 effects

– Not all early bilinguals are equal• Different ERPs for languages learned at age of 4,

compared to native languages

(“From birth” different than “From kindergarten”)

• BUT – is it AOA or proficiency?

Lexical Activation for late bilingualsMclaughlin and Osterhout (1997)

• College Students learning French– “The pizza was too hot to cry”

• N400 effects within 2 weeks of instruction

• Never reach native-level response to semantically unrelated words(even if show native-like behavior on lexical

decision tasks)

Brain structures and language learners (Golestani et al., 2006)

More white matter: left auditory region. More asymmetry in size of parietal lobes. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4883418.stm

What changes when you learn an L2?(Wang et al., 2003)

• Also recruit non-linguistic areas:– For tone, use area associated with pitch discrimination

(RH prefrontal cortex)

The bilingual brain(Mechelli et al., 2004)

• “The structure of the human brain is altered by the experience of acquiring a second language.”

• 3 Groups: – Monolingual English speakers– Early, balanced bilinguals– Late bilinguals (acquired between 10-15

y.o., practiced regularly for at least 5 years)

• Bilinguals denser in left inferior parietal cortex. [Area activated by “verbal fluency” tasks]

• Density correlates with AOA and proficiency

Cost in Switching Between Languages (Kohnert-Rice and Hernandez, 2002)

• Spanish-English early bilinguals

• Naming in L1 and L2 (fMRI)–No difference in single-language

condition

–More “cost” when switching between languages• increased activation in prefrontal cortex

Can you ever “turn off” one language for another?

(Rodriguez-Fornells et al., 2005)

• Bilinguals:– Made more mistakes– 100-200 ms slower to respond– ERPs had enhanced negativities for non-

coincidence trials– More overall activity in prefrontal cortex (executive

control?)

Language, Culture, and Cognition

Zipf’s Law

• The length of a word is negatively correlated with its frequency of usage– frequently used words are shortened

– Personal Computer PC– Videocamera-videocasette recorder camcorder

Learning Color Terms

• Dani– remember colors they saw better if they were

focal categories– learn names of color categories when focal

colors were at the center• …potential confound of discriminability?

Numbers

• English– 11, 12, unrelated to 1 & 2– 13-19, unit + decade name– 20-99, decade name + unit

• Chinese / Japanese / Korean– 11-99, decade name + unit name

• 18 = ten eight• 35 = three five

• Easier to acquire number names in Japanese?

Numbers

• Correlation between speed of number pronunciation & mathematical performance!

• Chinese children: – better at counting between 11-99 than English-

speaking kids– better place value understanding– higher mathematical performance

• Base-10 teaching improves performance in low-achieving Latino first graders

• Conclusion: number language influences mathematical thinking

Spatial Relationships (Bowerman, 1996)

• Languages differ in distinctions between spatial relationships– English: in (object inside container) vs. on (object

above surface, but touching) – Korean: kitta (tight fit) and nehta (loose fit)

• Cap on pen: kitta (unless closing, then ‘tatta’)• Letter in envelope: nehta/kitta• Apple in bowl: nehta

Do English speakers distinguish between tight and loose fits (like Korean speakers)?

(McDonough et al., 2000)

• Viewing time results:– Korean and English monolinguals – “Trained” on fit-condition (tight or loose)– Presented with two screens, one of each condition– Korean speakers looked longer at the type they’d

been “trained” on– No effect for English speakers

Do English speakers distinguish between tight and loose fits?

(McDonough et al., 2000) • Which of these does

not belong?– all but 1 object in same

fit-condition– Korean speakers picked

out “odd” objects– English speakers could

not

Relative and absolute space Tzeltal (Mayan language, Levinson 1996)

No relative spatial terms (left/right, front/back) – just absolute terms (uphill/downhill) in Tzeltal

Dutch and Tzeltal speakers:– Table 1: arrow pointing one direction– Table 2: two arrows pointing in opposite directions– Participants rotated 180° to other table– Identified the arrow “like the one they saw before”

• Dutch: same arrow relative to them• Tzeltal: arrow pointing in the same cardinal

direction

Relative and absolute space Li and Gleitman’s response (2002)

Tested English-speaking students:– Conducted the same study in two locations:

• a windowless room• outside on the quad

– Students chose the relative direction inside and the absolute direction outside

• Their conclusion: effects caused by differences in the experimental setting (not language)!

What about time? Chinese vs. English(Boroditsky, 2001)

• English - front/back metaphors describe time:– looking forward to a brighter tomorrow– falling behind schedule

• Chinese speakers also use vertical space: – earlier events are “up” – shang– later events are “down” – xia

So…do Chinese speakers conceive of time vertically?

Vertical and horizontal time

• Is March before April?– Vertical array, Mandarin speakers are faster– Horizontal array, English speakers are faster

• English speakers behave like Mandarin speakers after training in Mandarin time-telling

Does (grammatical) gender matter?Boroditsky, 2000

“Key” – masculine in German, feminine in Spanish der Schlüssel la llave

• Two groups: native German speakers and native Spanish speakers, (all proficient in English)

• Task: describe objects using 3 English adjectives• German speakers: “hard, heavy, jagged”• Spanish speakers: “golden, intricate, lovely”