Language Helps You Understand Events You See

Source: Image generated with AI, December 10, 2024

Suppose you watch someone make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. As you watch, you can probably divide the activities they perform into steps, like taking out two slices of bread or spreading the jelly on one of the slices. As you watch this activity happening, what enables you to break this event up into its component parts?

Having seen an event, you can remember it later. This memory may help you to perform the same action later. So, you may learn to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich (in part) by watching someone else do it. What enables you to remember what you've seen?

One possibility is that your ability to describe events is a core component of your capacity to break it into parts and to remember them. This possibility was explored in a fascinating paper published in 2024 in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition by Briony Banks and Louise Connell.

To test this possibility, they had people watch someone build simple models with Duplo blocks. After watching someone build the model, the participant had to build it themselves. People are generally pretty good at this task.

So, how would you determine whether language ability is helping?

These studies took advantage of an observation that if you make people speak a word repeatedly, it suppresses their ability to use language. So, some people watched the video and said the word “the” out loud over and over again, while other people watched the video without saying anything. Similarly, half the people in the study said the word “the” out loud while trying to build the model they saw being constructed, while others said nothing.

The researchers found that suppressing the ability to use language by saying “the” while watching the video led to worse performance reconstructing the model later compared to those people who watched the video without saying anything. Having to say “the” while building the model did not have a significant impact on performance.

Of course, it is possible that doing any secondary task while watching a video would hurt performance. In a second study, some people watched the video without doing anything. Some people watched the video while saying “the.” A third group watched the video and had to listen for clicks and to report every time they heard a click. This secondary listening task keeps people busy, but doesn’t interfere with language.

In this study, only those people who watched the video while saying “the” did poorly when reconstructing the model. The group that didn’t do anything and the group that listened for clicks both did well at reconstructing the model.

What does this all mean?

These findings suggest that language influences our ability to understand and remember events that we see. These findings also suggest that once we have learned the event, language is less important. That is why people who said “the” while reconstructing the model did about as well as those who said nothing.

You may not be aware that you’re mentally describing events as you watch them, but our ability to use language is so deeply a part of the way that we think, that we often don’t notice our engagement of our language system when engaged in tasks like understanding events unfolding in the world. Yet, that is another way that our language abilities are supporting our thinking abilities.