An Agent‐First Preference in a Patient‐First Language During Sentence Comprehension

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.

Surprisal From Language Models Can Predict ERPs in Processing Predicate-Argument Structures Only if Enriched by an Agent Preference Principle

“…For a language like Basque or Hindi, where the canonical word order is agent-initial, an Agent Preference may not be overridden; the overall probabilistic signal from agent-initial sentences is too strong. This is strikingly different for an OVS language like Äiwoo, where the Agent Preference is indeed overriden when the role-ambiguous initial NP has nonhuman reference ( Sauppe et al, 2023 ), or for Chinese, where it is overriden for inanimate referents when an agent-initial interpretation is pragmatically extremely marked ( Wang et al, 2009 ). Varying affordances across languages result in different processing behaviours, and in the present case, the Agent Preference principle may be resistant to the language input in German, Basque, and Hindi, but not for inanimate NPs in Äiwoo and Chinese.…”

“…Second, [NP inanimate V NP] sentences reversed the effect in Äiwoo, arguably because the inanimate NP further strengthens its syntactic default interpretation as a patient in this language. This seems to override the Agent Preference observed for human referent NPs in Äiwoo ( Sauppe et al, 2023 ).…”

“…This is particularly important when investigating different languages because topographies might differ across them. In these regards, the GAM approach is similar in spirit to traditional cluster-based permutation tests but unlike these tests, GAMs allow multiple predictors, which is key to comparing effects of surprisal and the Agent Preference ( De Cat et al, 2015 ; Sauppe et al, 2023 ; Tremblay & Newman, 2015 ).…”

“…Another experimental design was used in Turkish ( Demiral et al, 2008 ), Hindi ( Bickel et al, 2015 ), Chinese ( Wang et al, 2009 ), and Äiwoo (an Oceanic language, Sauppe et al, 2023 ). In these studies, an initial ambiguous NP was subsequently disambiguated to an agent or a patient by the verb, i.e., in [NP V] structures.…”

What eye and hand movements tell us about expectations towards argument order: An eye- and mouse-tracking study in German

“…Much research has focused on semantic role ambiguities to examine comprehenders' interpretative biases for transitive events. In an event-related potential (ERP) experiment on the incremental interpretation of sentences with role-ambiguous initial NPs, Sauppe et al (2023) tested speakers of Äiwoo. In the basic word order of this language, the patient precedes the agent.…”