Department of Linguistics, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, MC 0108, La Jolla, CA, 92093-0108, USA.
Department of Language Science, University of California, Irvine, Social Science Plaza B #2239, Irvine, CA, 92697-5100, USA.
Behav Res Methods. 2021 Oct;53(5):2172-2190. doi: 10.3758/s13428-021-01561-1. Epub 2021 Mar 29.
Implicit causality (IC) biases, the tendency of certain verbs to elicit re-mention of either the first-mentioned noun phrase (NP1) or the second-mentioned noun phrase (NP2) from the previous clause, are important in psycholinguistic research. Understanding IC verbs and the source of their biases in signed as well as spoken languages helps elucidate whether these phenomena are language general or specific to the spoken modality. As the first of its kind, this study investigates IC biases in American Sign Language (ASL) and provides IC bias norms for over 200 verbs, facilitating future psycholinguistic studies of ASL and comparisons of spoken versus signed languages. We investigated whether native ASL signers continued sentences with IC verbs (e.g., ASL equivalents of 'Lisa annoys Maya because…') by mentioning NP1 (i.e., Lisa) or NP2 (i.e., Maya). We found a tendency towards more NP2-biased verbs. Previous work has found that a verb's thematic roles predict bias direction: stimulus-experiencer verbs (e.g., 'annoy'), where the first argument is the stimulus (causing annoyance) and the second argument is the experiencer (experiencing annoyance), elicit more NP1 continuations. Verbs with experiencer-stimulus thematic roles (e.g., 'love') elicit more NP2 continuations. We probed whether the trend towards more NP2-biased verbs was related to an existing claim that stimulus-experiencer verbs do not exist in sign languages. We found that stimulus-experiencer structure, while permitted, is infrequent, impacting the IC bias distribution in ASL. Nevertheless, thematic roles predict IC bias in ASL, suggesting that the thematic role-IC bias relationship is stable across languages as well as modalities.
隐式因果关系 (IC) 偏差是指某些动词倾向于从前一个从句中重新提及第一个名词短语 (NP1) 或第二个名词短语 (NP2)，这在心理语言学研究中很重要。理解签名语言和口语中的 IC 动词及其偏差的来源有助于阐明这些现象是语言普遍存在的，还是特定于口语模态的。作为此类研究的首例，本研究调查了美国手语 (ASL) 中的 IC 偏差，并为 200 多个动词提供了 IC 偏差规范，为未来的 ASL 心理语言学研究和口语与签名语言的比较提供了便利。我们调查了以 ASL 为母语的手语使用者是否会通过提及 NP1（即 Lisa）或 NP2（即 Maya）来继续使用 IC 动词（例如，“Lisa annoys Maya because…”的 ASL 等效动词）完成句子。我们发现，动词更倾向于具有 NP2 偏差。先前的研究发现，动词的主题角色可以预测偏差方向：刺激-体验者动词（例如“annoy”），其中第一个参数是刺激（引起烦恼），第二个参数是体验者（体验烦恼），会引出更多的 NP1 延续。具有体验者-刺激主题角色的动词（例如“love”）会引出更多的 NP2 延续。我们探究了更多的 NP2 偏向动词的趋势是否与一个现有的说法有关，即刺激-体验者动词不存在于手语中。我们发现，尽管允许存在刺激-体验者结构，但这种结构很少见，这会影响 ASL 中的 IC 偏差分布。然而，主题角色可以预测 ASL 中的 IC 偏差，这表明主题角色-IC 偏差关系在语言和模态上都是稳定的。
