Perception of action events: a study of monolingual speakers and bilingual speakers

Abstract

Unlike English, Mandarin is a language which does not contain tense markers to indicate different tense. For example, some English verbs combined with “ed” in past tense show that the action took place in the past, whereas in Mandarin, speakers may use separate words (e.g. “gang cai”, just now) to express events happened in the past. According to linguistics relativity hypothesis, speakers of English and Mandarin may perceive actions in different tense differently. This paper will study how English speakers, Mandarin speakers and Mandarin-English bilingual speakers perceive actions in different tense in different ways.