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Asymmetries in encoding event roles: Evidence from language and cognition
Ercenur Ünal1, Frances Wilson2, John Trueswell3
1Department of Psychology, Ozyegin University, Istanbul, Turkey.
Cognition
|July 3, 2024
Summary
This study shows that the prominence of event roles like Agents and Patients in language closely mirrors their prominence in cognition, supporting the idea that language structure reflects conceptual event representations.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
- Psychology
Background:
- Hypothesized link between linguistic event structure and non-linguistic event roles.
- Lack of systematic experimental testing on the language-cognition relationship of event participant prominence.
Purpose of the Study:
- To experimentally investigate the relationship between the linguistic and cognitive prominence of event roles (Agents, Patients, Goals, Instruments).
- To determine if linguistic encoding of events reflects underlying conceptual representations.
Main Methods:
- Four experiments were conducted.
- Investigated prominence of Agents, Patients, Goals, and Instruments in linguistic descriptions.
- Assessed cognitive prominence using visual search and change blindness tasks.
Main Results:
- Patients were consistently more salient than Goals, and Goals more than Instruments across tasks.
- Animate Agents were more salient than Patients in language and visual search, but not change detection.
- Similarities, though not identical, were found between linguistic and non-linguistic prominence measures.
Conclusions:
- Revealed homologies between linguistic and cognitive prominence of event participants.
- Supports the theory that linguistic event structure is grounded in conceptual event representations.
- Findings have implications for linguistic theory and event cognition research.
Keywords:
Argument structureCausativesEventEvent cognitionEvent perceptionEvent rolesEye-trackingThematic rolesMore Related Videos
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