2023/09/01 by Sebastian Sauppe, Åshild Næss, Giovanni Roversi +3 · 1 voice · 28 citations
Arts and Humanities · Mathematics · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Cognitive psychology #Comprehension #Computer science #Electroencephalography #Event-related potential #Language Development and Disorders #Linguistics #Mathematics #N400 #Natural language processing #Negativity effect #Neurobiology of Language and Bilingualism #Neuroscience #Noun #Preference #Property (philosophy) #Psychology #Sentence #Sentence processing #Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/cogs.13340
published in Cognitive Science 47(9), e13340 (Wiley)
openalex publication_date 2023/09/01 · openalex created_date 2023/09/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
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.