Agentive versus non-agentive motions immediately influence event apprehension and description: an eye-tracking study in a VOS language

Abstract

The embodied cognition hypothesis postulates that human cognition is fundamentally grounded in our experience of interacting with the physical world (Barsalou in Behav Brain Sci 22:577–609, 1999). Research has shown bi-directional associations between physical action and the processes of understanding language: language comprehension seems to activate implied visual and motor components (Zwaan and Taylor in J Exp Psychol Gen 135(1):1–11, 2006), and action behavior seems to facilitate the comprehension of associated action-language (Beilock et al. in Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105:13269–13273, 2008). Although numerous research studies have reported a link between action and language comprehension, the exact nature of their association remains subject to debate (Chatterjee in Lang Cognit 2:79–116, 2010). Moreover, the role of action in the production of language is under-explored, as are general language production processes in Austronesian languages. The endangered Austronesian language Truku provides typological patterns that are both under-examined in psycholinguistic research and informative for questions of language production. Truku allows flexibility in the relative location of verbs versus arguments in sentence production, and uses a symmetrical voice system that marks the prominence of different participants in an event. Working with native speakers of Truku, we tested whether performing physical motions immediately affects the conceptual saliency of the components represented in a to-be-described event in ways that guide speakers’ visual attention and shape their utterance formulation. More specifically, we investigated whether speakers’ engagement as an agent or patient in a non-speech physical action affects initial eye-fixations on agent versus patient participants in a visual scene, as well as word order and grammatical voice choices in the speakers’ descriptions of simple transitive events. The results revealed significant effects of physical action on the relative location and prominence of agents in subsequent sentence formulation, and on online patterns of eye fixations. These results provide further support for language-action connections in cognitive processing, and shed light on the cross-linguistic patterns of sentence production.

Differential effects of agency, animacy, and syntactic prominence on production and comprehension: Evidence from a verb-initial language.

“…A second important observation is that, despite the differing influences of constraints between the production and comprehension experiments, they were similar in demonstrating variability of outcomes. It is common in psycholinguistic research to report variability in the formulated message in sentence-level picture description tasks (e.g., Bock & Warren, 1985; Gennari & MacDonald, 2008; Sato et al, 2020; Tanaka et al, 2011). In Experiment 1, this variability in production was demonstrated as small counts to other elements in the first and second positions despite the dominance of the agents and pivots in these two positions.…”

Mandarin and English Event Cognitive Alignment From Corpus-Based Semantic Fusion Model Perspective

“…Croft (2012) analyzes the direct mappings between specific event structures and syntactic positions (e.g., subject and object) (Rissman and Majid, 2019). Fuzzy semantic overlapping allows a member to belong to more than one community (Sato et al, 2020). Similarly, in language, semantic fusion helps a participant to enter two actions and link them into a composite event (Langacker, 2012).…”

A decade of language processing research: Which place for linguistic diversity?

“…4 Yano et al. (2019),Ono et al (2020) andSato et al (2020) took advantage of these characteristics in addition to the flexible word order in Truku Seediq (despite its canonical VOS word order) to investigate the interplay of two factors during the computation of the argument structure of a sentence: conceptual accessibility ('actor' role preceding 'patient' role is more easily processed)…”