10. Motion events in Japanese and English

This study investigates the effect of a typologically different second language on learners’ attention to different aspects of a motion event. Results revealed that L2 learners are not significantly different from the monolinguals in their attention to manner or path. It is proposed that education may be a factor that leads learners to attend to dimensions other than those guided by their native language. The theoretical implication is that language is not the only way to expand habitual attention, which is consistent with the results of other studies that show world knowledge about motion events (Vidaković, this volume) and universal cognitive mechanisms (Marotta and Meini, this volume) play a role in L2 acquisition in the spatial domain.