Interpreting intentions: evidence for cross-language influences in bilinguals
Abstract
In Malay, accidental actions are marked with the prefix -ter. Malay speakers typically assume a deliberate intent when the prefix is absent. I investigated whether Malay-English bilinguals are more likely than English monolinguals to interpret actions in English sentences as deliberate when they are not clearly indicated as being accidental. In Experiment 1, Malay speakers completed a recognition memory task. The results showed that Malay speakers remembered unintentionality accurately. This accuracy in remembering unintentionality suggests that Malay speakers encode the intentions of others. In Experiment 2, participants completed a cross-modal priming task. They first heard scenarios in which a character’s action was either accidental or was ambiguous as to intent, and then they saw either a word that was consistent with an unintended-action interpretation, an unrelated word, or a nonword and made a lexical decision. The grammatical intention marker in Malay influenced speakers’ perception of intentions even when listening to English. Bilinguals showed a smaller priming effect than monolinguals only in the ambiguous condition, suggesting that they were more likely to have interpreted intention-ambiguous actions as deliberate. These findings inform our understanding of cross-cultural communication differences.