Consensus on the extent to which crosslinguistic differences affect event cognition is currently absent. This is partly because cognitive influences of language have rarely been examined within speakers of different languages in tasks that manipulate the level of visual processing. This study presents a novel combination of a high-level approach upregulating the involvement of language, namely self-paced sentence-video verification, and a low-level visual detection method without language use, namely breaking continuous flash suppression (b-CFS) (Yang et al., 2014). The results point to crosslinguistic effects on event cognition by revealing variations in visual processing patterns of manner and path by English vs. Mandarin Chinese speakers. Language-specificity was found on both levels of processing. An asymmetry in response speed across tasks highlights an important difference between facilitation when recruitment of verbal labels is automatic, versus increased competition when labels are overt and their relevance needs to be verified.