Mapping Concepts Onto Linguistic Structure: The Case of Animacy

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Science
• Psycholinguistics
• Linguistic Theory

Background:

• Speakers map meaning to syntax, with conceptual features like animacy potentially influencing this indirectly via thematic roles.
• Previous research on active-passive alternation suggests indirect influence of animacy on sentence structure.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if animacy directly impacts linear order priming in coordinated noun phrases, which lack thematic roles.
• To explore the direct mapping of animacy features onto sentence structure during language production.

Main Methods:

• A picture-description task was employed across two experiments.
• Experiment 1 examined priming of noun coordinate order based on animacy and spatial naming order.
• Experiment 2 tested the persistence of animacy order when nouns were repeated from prime to target.

Main Results:

• Linear order of noun coordinates was primed by both animacy order and spatial naming order in Experiment 1.
• Experiment 2 demonstrated that animacy order, unlike spatial naming order, persisted when nouns were repeated.
• This persistence of animacy order contrasts with the active-passive alternation, where only verb repetition matters.

Conclusions:

• Animacy can directly influence linear word order in noun phrases, independent of thematic roles.
• Language production utilizes distinct pathways for mapping feature-based (animacy) and relational (thematic roles) meanings onto syntactic structures.
• Findings contribute to understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying sentence construction and meaning-to-syntax mapping.