Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? But what if something so natural as the language you speak affects the way you remember and report events? Simple things, like the verbs you use and the locations of nouns in a sentence, can have an impactful role in the way your brain encodes and recalls even the most mundane of experiences.
Anyone who has ever taken a Spanish or French class in high school knows that verbs can be tricky. With a multitude of conjugations and spelling variations, learning verb tenses requires memory tricks and plenty of practice. Reflexive verbs can throw a wrench in this system, especially considering how common they are in romance languages. As the name suggests, reflexive verbs directly and identifiably reflect back on the subject who is performing the action. For instance, in Spanish, “la ventana se rompió ” directly translates literally to “the window broke itself” in English. English has its own variation of reflexive verbs but are less common and are used in very specific contexts, such as in “I washed myself”.
Simple things, like the verbs you use and the locations of nouns in a sentence, can have an impactful role in the way your brain encodes and recalls even the most mundane of experiences.
This reflexive quality in Spanish and English can be attributed to agentive language. Agentive sentences follow a very basic format: the subject, followed by the verb, and then ended with the noun on which the subject is performing the verb on. For instance, “John broke the window” uses John as the agent which performed the action. Conversely, non-agentive language lacks the agent. For instance, “the window broke,” implies the window magically broke, and there was no agent present who actively broke it. While agentive and non-agentive language are present in both English and Spanish, the context in which it is used can have powerful implications on eye-witness accounts.
With the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, eye-witness testimonies have never had more importance. It is crucial that events are reported with accuracy, especially in who receives the blame for the criminal action. This is where agentive and non-agentive language come into play. A study performed by Fausey and Boroditsky at Stanford University found that while both monolingual English and Spanish speakers can properly identify who was to blame for intentional actions, English speakers were more likely to use agentive language when reporting accidental events. When English speakers were shown a clearly accidental event, such as someone knocking over a mug of coffee with their elbow, they reported the incident as “the person knocked over the mug” rather than “the mug was knocked over.” Spanish speakers did the opposite, instead preferring a non-agentive description of the event.
So why does the way we report incidents matter? It’s theorized that the type of agentive language used in internal cognition influences how memories are encoded. If a language predominantly uses non-agentive language, then speakers’ attention would visually orient to the object and not the action. The inverse is likely for predominantly agentive languages, where the speaker orients on the agent and not the object. This fixation can be reflected in the way people remember events. Fausey and Boroditsky discovered that Spanish speakers had a more difficult time remembering the individual involved in accidental events. When shown an accidental action twice with different actors, Spanish speakers had a more difficult time identifying who did the action first, as they encoded the event in the context of what happened to the object and not who did the action.
It’s theorized that the type of agentive language used in internal cognition influences how memories are encoded.
This internal bias from naturally generated thought could lead to serious implications in real-world situations. Fixating on objects rather than agents could lead to incomplete or false memories of an event, which is something that could impact the availability and validity of eye-witnesses. In situations where the attention is ambiguous, will the ambiguous nature and tendency to use non-agentive language lead to false testimonies? The same goes for over-attributing blame. Are English speakers more likely to believe that someone did something intentionally if the accidental event is encoded agentively?
Psychon Bull Rev (2011). DOI: 10.3758/s13423-010-0021-5
