Rissman Lilia, Woodward Amanda, Goldin-Meadow Susan
Center for Language Studies, Radboud University, Erasmusplein 1, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 South University Ave., Chicago, IL 60637.
Lang Cogn Neurosci. 2019;34(3):273-288. doi: 10.1080/23273798.2018.1525495. Epub 2018 Sep 26.
The language that people use to describe events reflects their perspective on the event. This linguistic encoding is influenced by , particularly whether individuals in the event are animate or agentive--animates are more likely than inanimates to appear as Subject of a sentence, and agents are more likely than patients to appear as Subject. We tested whether aspects of a scene can override these two conceptual biases when they are aligned: whether a visually prominent will be selected as Subject when pitted against a visually backgrounded . We manipulated visual prominence by contrasting scenes in which the face/torso/hand of the agent were visible vs. scenes in which only the hand was visible. Events with only a hand were more often associated with passive descriptions, in both production and comprehension tasks. These results highlight the power of visual prominence to guide how people conceptualize events.
人们用来描述事件的语言反映了他们对该事件的看法。这种语言编码受到多种因素的影响，特别是事件中的个体是有生命的还是有能动性的——有生命的物体比无生命的物体更有可能成为句子的主语，有能动性的个体比受动者更有可能成为主语。我们测试了场景的某些方面在与这两种概念偏见一致时是否能够超越它们：当一个视觉上突出的物体与一个视觉上处于背景中的物体相对比时，前者是否会被选为句子主语。我们通过对比两种场景来操纵视觉突出性，一种场景中施事者的脸/躯干/手是可见的，另一种场景中只有手是可见的。在产出和理解任务中，仅出现手的事件更常与被动描述相关联。这些结果凸显了视觉突出性在引导人们对事件进行概念化方面的作用。
