Thinking and speaking in a second language: 
How early Cantonese-English bilinguals perceive and categorize motion events
語言和思維在二語中的表達：
早期粵語-英語雙語者對空間運動事件的認知與歸類
Presenter: Dr. Yi Wang (王熠)
The question of whether the language we speak shapes the way we think has generated extensive debate in recent decades. The study of how language influences thought, also known as linguistic relativity (Whorf, 1956), has recently received renewed interest as a number of new research paradigms have evolved that allow addressing the interplay between language and thought empirically.
Experimental evidence suggests that cross-linguistic differences in linguistic encoding can ‘augment certain types of thinking’ (Wolff & Holmes, 2011, p. 253), such as attention, recognition memory, visual discrimination, sorting and categorization, in a flexible and context-dependent manner. For instance, cross-linguistic differences in colour vocabularies can cause differences in colour categorization, indicating that language effects are profound in the sense of affecting even basic ‘categorical perception’ (i.e., faster or more accurate discrimination of stimuli that straddle a category boundary, Regier & Kay, 2009, p. 439). However, such linguistic relativity effects are vulnerable to short-term manipulations, such as recent linguistic priming (Montero-Melis et al., 2016), the language of instruction (Athanasopoulos, Bylund et al., 2015) and verbal interference (Gennari et al., 2002).
This study investigated how strongly verbal labels affect early Cantonese-English bilinguals’ perception and categorization of similar events. Using a triad-matching paradigm with the same participant populations (N=120), we compared monolingual and bilingual speakers’ performance on similarity judgements under three conditions (i.e., with either Cantonese- or English-based linguistic encoding, in silence, and with verbal interference) where their access to language was progressively reduced. It was found that bilinguals exhibited an English-like way in categorization preferences and processing efficiency (i.e., reaction time) as long as the access to language was possible during task performance. However, the observed crosslinguistic differences in categorization disappeared when the use of language was blocked by a concurrent verbal interference. These findings suggest that learning an L2 with even subtle typological differences can redirect people’s cognitive behaviour, and the magnitude of such impact is modulated by the degree to which verbal labels are activated during cognitive processing.
Bio
Dr Yi Wang is an Assistant Professor of English Language and Linguistics at Cardiff University. Before joining Cardiff, she worked as an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) postdoctoral fellow at UCL Centre for Applied Linguistics.
She has a background in both cognitive linguistics and language typology, with experience in first and second language acquisition, language and cognition, language processing, and the interaction between language learning and cognitive development. She approaches linguistic typology from an experimental perspective and uses a combination of both offline and online measures to explore how language variation may make a difference in language acquisition and processing, with a particular focus on the domain of motion.
Recent publications
Wang, Y., & Li, W. (2022). Thinking and speaking in a second language (Cambridge Elements in Second Language Acquisition). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Online ISBN: 9781009075053.
Zhang, H., Wang, Y*., & Vanek, N. (2022). Negation processing in Chinese English bilinguals: Insights from the Stroop paradigm. International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism. 
Wang, Y., & Li, W. (2022). Multiple Language learning and cognitive restructuring: the role of audiovisual media exposure in Cantonese-English-Japanese multilinguals’ motion event cognition. International Journal of Bilingualism.
Wang, Y., & Li, W. (2021). Two languages, one mind: the effects of language learning on motion event processing in Cantonese-English bilinguals. Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 2169-2175.
Wang, Y., & Li, W. (2021). Cognitive restructuring in the multilingual mind: language-specific effects on processing efficiency of caused motion events in Cantonese-English-Japanese speakers. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 24(4), 730-745.
Wang, Y., & Li, W. (2019). Cognitive restructuring in the bilingual mind: Motion event construal in early Cantonese-English bilinguals. Language and Cognition, 11(4), 527-554
The Cambridge Element ‘Thinking and Speaking in a Second Language’ provides a state-of-art synthesis of contemporary research on how first and second language speakers create and develop new language systems and cognitive abilities. This Element is free online from 27th May - 10th June. 
https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/thinking-and-speaking-in-a-second-language/A08F458B9DA07FCA64FE614BA44370E6
Moderator:Ms. Xuran Han (韓煦然)
(University College London)
Language: English
Time: 7:00 PM, June 10th (Beijing Time)
Zoom ID: 959 6270 3011
Passcode: ccbs
Scan the QR code to sign up as Presenter! 
Or contact Dr. Gao Fei ([email protected]) for inquiries.
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