An agent-first preference in a patient-first language during sentence comprehension
Date
2023
Authors
Sauppe, S.
Næss, Å.
Roversi, G.
Meyer, M.
Bornkessel Schlesewsky, I.
Bickel, B.
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Journal article
Citation
Cognitive Science, 2023; 47(9):1-36
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Abstract
The language comprehension system preferentially assumes that agents come first during incremental processing. While this might reflect a biologically fixed bias, shared with other domains and other species, the evidence is limited to languages that place agents first, and so the bias could also be learned from usage frequency. Here, we probe the bias with electroencephalography (EEG) in Äiwoo, a language that by default places patients first, but where sentence-initial nouns are still locally ambiguous between patient or agent roles.
Comprehenders transiently interpreted nonhuman nouns as patients, eliciting a negativity when disambiguation was toward the less common agent-initial order. By contrast and against frequencies, human nouns were transiently interpreted as agents, eliciting an N400-like negativity when the disambiguation was toward patient-initial order. Consistent with the notion of a fixed property, the agent bias is robust against usage frequency for human referents. However, this bias can be reversed by frequency experience for nonhuman referents.
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Data source: Supporting information, https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.13340
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Copyright 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Access Condition Notes: Open access funding provided by Universität Zürich.