Motion event cognition and multilingualism: Evidence from Croatian-English bilinguals

The present study extends the scope of the grammatical aspect approach to motion event
cognition research by investigating how Croatian speakers of English encode and conceptualise
motion events. Even though both Croatian and English have a grammatical category of aspect,
the findings suggest that intratypological variation plays an important role in how participants
construed goal-oriented motion events. This study utilised two tasks that investigated motion
event endpoint encoding. In the non-verbal similarity judgement task, participants acted as aspect
language speakers. However, in the non-verbal endpoint encoding task, they acted as non-aspect
language speakers. Such results suggest that participants adopted a maximal viewing frame,
instead of an immediate viewing frame, in the non-verbal task, possibly due to the Croatian
aspectual system’s stronger focus on the totality of an event. Individual learner differences in
English age of acquisition, English proficiency, English usage, English learning context, and
length of residence in an English-speaking environment were not found to influence event
endpoint encodings. Only slight, non-significant trends were observed in the naturalistic context
of English learning and English usage. The possession of a third language also showed no
influence on endpoint encoding, possibly due to low L3 usage among participants.