Thus, the accidental events were characterized by a “whoops!” reaction such as a startle response, surprised facial expressions, and/or surprised hand gestures. In this case, the man showed a startle response and threw his hands up in surprise. In the accidental version of this event, a man was writing, and while writing the pencil broke in half. For example, in the intentional version of the pencil-breaking event, a man who was seated at a desk picked up a pencil, deliberately broke it in half, and looked satisfied. The man’s reaction differed between the intentional and accidental versions of the event. In all events, a man physically interacted with an object. Videos of intentional and accidental versions of 16 unique events were used (Table 1). Instructions in the two languages were developed simultaneously and verified by an independent Spanish-English bilingual. Participants read instructions in either English or Spanish. All participants reported that their native language, and over 80% of their current daily language use (mean = 99.98%), is the target language and that they did not start learning any other language until after age 12. Participants were monolinguals who completed the study via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service ( ). Sixty-eight English speakers (mean age = 31.49 years) and 29 Spanish speakers (mean age = 28.69 years) participated. In this paper, we specifically test for cross-linguistic differences in memory for causal events in a task where participants are not asked to describe the events at any time before or during the memory task. Observing a cross-linguistic difference on a test of cognitive performance even when people are not required to use language in the task has become the gold standard for establishing basic cross-linguistic differences in cognition. Many of these studies have found cross-linguistic differences in how people encode and reason about motion events (e.g., Finkbeiner et al., 2002 Gennari et al., 2002 Oh, 2003 Papafragou et al., 2008 Slobin, 2003 Trueswell & Papafragou, 2010), though some find such differences only when people are explicitly instructed to describe the events during the task (e.g., Gennari et al., 2002 Papafragou et al., 2008). Much previous cross-linguistic work on the role of language in event cognition has focused on cross-linguistic differences in encoding the manner and path of motion (e.g., Billman & Krych, 1998 Finkbeiner, Nicol, Greth, & Nakamura, 2002 Gennari, Sloman, Malt, & Fitch, 2002 Oh, 2003 Papafragou, Hulbert, & Trueswell, 2008 Papafragou, Massey, & Gleitman, 2002 Slobin, 2003 Trueswell & Papafragou, 2010).
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