An Agent-First Preference in a Patient-First Language during Sentence Comprehension

Autor/inn/en	Sauppe, Sebastian; Naess, Åshild; Roversi, Giovanni; Meyer, Martin; Bornkessel-Schlesewsky, Ina; Bickel, Balthasar
Titel	An Agent-First Preference in a Patient-First Language during Sentence Comprehension
Quelle	In: Cognitive Science, 47 (2023) 9, (36 Seiten) PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	0364-0213
DOI	10.1111/cogs.13340
Schlagwörter	Language Processing; Diagnostic Tests; Patients; Nouns; Word Frequency; Ambiguity (Semantics); Artificial Intelligence; Brain Hemisphere Functions; Native Language; Malayo Polynesian Languages + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Sprachverarbeitung; Diagnostic test; Diagnostischer Test; Patient; Word analysis; Frequency; Wortanalyse; Häufigkeit; Künstliche Intelligenz
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. (As Provided).
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Erfasst von	ERIC (Education Resources Information Center), Washington, DC
Update	2024/1/01