Syntax and Intentionality: An Automatic Link Between Language and Theory-of-Mind

Abstract

Three studies provided evidence that syntax influences intentionality judgments. In Experiment 1, participants made either speeded or unspeeded intentionality judgments about ambiguously intentional subjects or objects. Participants were more likely to judge grammatical subjects as acting intentionally in the speeded relative to the reflective condition (thus showing an intentionality bias), but grammatical objects revealed the opposite pattern of results (thus showing an unintentionality bias). In Experiment 2, participants made an intentionality judgment about one of the two actors in a partially symmetric sentence (e.g., "John exchanged products with Susan"). The results revealed a tendency to treat the grammatical subject as acting more intentionally than the grammatical object. In Experiment 3 participants were encouraged to think about the events that such sentences typically refer to, and the tendency was significantly reduced. These results suggest a privileged relationship between language and central theory-of-mind concepts. More specifically, there may be two ways of determining intentionality judgments: (1) an automatic verbal bias to treat grammatical subjects (but not objects) as intentional (2) a deeper, more careful consideration of the events typically described by a sentence. KeywordsTheory-of-Mind; Language; Intentionality; Cognitive Biases; Heuristic Reasoning; Semantics; Syntax; Thematic Roles Certain aspects of theory-of-mind appear to be automatic. For example, on the basis of visual cues alone, people spontaneously ascribe certain mental states to actors that may conflict with the judgments they make after careful reflection (e.g. Heider & Simmel, 1944;Gao, McCarthy & Scholl, 2010). Such automatic processes may arise from "core knowledge" structures often studied by infancy researchers (Spelke, 2000; Kinzler&Spelke, 2007) and are seen as continuing to operate automatically into adulthood (Cheries, Mitroff, Wynn & Scholl, 2009;Flombaum & Scholl, 2006). Due to their illusory nature, these attributions can be quite different from the judgments people make after taking the time to think more deeply about a situation.© 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved Address for reprints and correspondence : Brent Strickland Department of Psychology Yale University Box 208205 New Haven, CT 06520-8205 brent.strickland@yale.edu Phone/Fax : 203-432-2518 (Phone), -7172 (Fax). 3 In Experiment 3 we explicitly test the hypothesis that people have two ways of thinking about intentionality for such verbs. NIH Public Access Author ManuscriptCognition. Author manuscript; available in PMC 2015 October 01. NIH-PA Author ManuscriptNIH-PA Author Manuscript NIH-PA Author ManuscriptHere we ask whether linguistic cues might also trigger the immediate impression of intentionality in a way similar to visual cues. In particular, the current studies suggest a connection between the grammatical subject position and a representation of intentional action. This link creates a bias for stronger intentionality attribut...

Moral Structure Falls Out of General Event Structure

“…Indeed this was confirmed in our studies (Strickland, Fisher, Keil & Knobe, 2012;Strickland, Fisher, Peyroux & Keil, 2011). So, for example, in a simple judgment task when participants were shown just one sentence and asked to indicate how intentionally either the grammatical subject or direct object acted, they consistently judged subjects to be more intentional than objects.…”

“…Recent work in our lab has revealed that when people actually interpret these sentences they have an automatic bias to attribute more agency to grammatical subjects compared to non-subjects (Strickland, Fisher, Keil & Knobe, 2012;Strickland, Fisher, Peyroux & Keil, 2011). So for example, in one experiment, participants were shown sentences like (6) or (7) and asked to indicate whether or not the underlined person acted intentionally or unintentionally.…”

Language Reflects “Core” Cognition: A New Theory About the Origin of Cross‐Linguistic Regularities

“…Consistent with this proposal, Strickland, Fisher, et al. (), Strickland, Geraci, et al. () recently showed that native English speakers who lack significant signing experience are nevertheless able to correctly extract telicity from the visual patterns of entirely unfamiliar signs.…”

“…A third example is that of event or thematic roles (Dowty, ; Fillmore, ; Gruber, ), which may have their roots in core knowledge. In linguistics, this theoretical construct helps capture the intuition that there is something semantically shared across the argument structure of many verbs within a given language (Strickland, Fisher, Knobe, & Keil, ; Wagner & Lakusta, ). Take, for example, sentences (3–5):…”

The ‘I’ of the author and its persuasive function (as exemplified by the complex sentence with homogeneously collateral sub clauses)

“…In some experiments [6] our colleagues provided a definition of how intentionality/non-intentionality of an utterance is related to the cognitive choice of optional syntactic constructions. In terms of the 'languagethought -speech' relation, these studies offered some evidence that the pragmatic nature of syntactic units affects intentionality of a sentence and also allows to shift emphases across the utterance, subject to the functional conditions under which it was generated.…”