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Updated: Jul 16, 2026
05:15
The (Spatial) Memory Game: Testing the Relationship Between Spatial Language, Object Knowledge, and Spatial Cognition
Published on: February 19, 2018
From conceptual roles to structural relations: bridging the syntactic cleft.
Psychological Review
|January 1, 1992
Summary
This study explores how animate entities are linked to the subject role in language production. Findings suggest a basic cognitive-linguistic link, favoring meaning over form in this mapping process.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Psycholinguistics
- Linguistics
Background:
- The study of underlying versus superficial linguistic structures is central to cognitive psychology.
- Psycholinguistics traditionally posits that underlying syntactic relations can shift to different surface relations.
Purpose of the Study:
- To examine the role of animate entities in surface subject relations during language production.
- To evaluate competing accounts of conceptual-syntactic mapping in language production.
Main Methods:
- Review of psycholinguistic evidence on language production.
- Analysis of the binding of conceptual categories to syntactic relations.
Main Results:
- Evidence supports a fundamental tendency to bind animate entities to the surface subject relation.
- Findings challenge syntactic relation-changing operations in language production.
Conclusions:
- The mapping from conceptual categories to syntactic relations is a key aspect of language generation.
- A distinction between meaning-based and form-based mechanisms is favored in explaining this mapping process.
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