ABSTRACT
Does the language you speak shape the way you think about the world? Four studies investigate how English and Indonesian speakers encode and represent action events. Unlike English, Indonesian verbs do not include tense markers. Indonesian speakers are not required to indicate whether an event has already occurred, is happening now, or will occur in the future. Does needing to include tense to speak English grammatically change the way English speakers pay attention to, encode and remember events? We find cross-linguistic differences in memory and similarity judgments between English and Indonesian speakers, as well as between Indonesian-English bilinguals tested in English and Indonesian.
