Grammar, Gender and Demonstratives in Lateralized Imagery for Sentences

Abstract

We investigated biases in the organization of imagery by asking participants to make stick-figure drawings of sentences containing a man, a woman and a transitive action (e.g. She kisses that guy). Previous findings show that prominent features of meaning and sentence structure are placed to the left in drawings, according to reading direction (e.g. Stroustrup & Wallentin, 2018). Five hundred thirty participants listened to sentences in Danish and made 8 drawings each. We replicated three findings: 1) that the first mentioned element is placed to the left more often, 2) that the agent in the sentence is placed to the left, and 3) that the grammatical subject is placed to the left of the object. We further tested hypotheses related to deixis and gender stereotypes. By adding demonstratives (e.g. Danish equivalents of this and that), that have been found to indicate attentional prominence, we tested the hypothesis that this is also translated into a left-ward bias in the produced drawings. We were unable to find support for this hypothesis. Analyses of gender biases tested the presence of a gender identification and a gender stereotype effect. According to the identification hypothesis, participants should attribute prominence to their own gender and draw it to the left, and according to the stereotype effect participants should be more prone to draw the male character to the left, regardless of own gender. We were not able to find significant support for either of the two gender effects. The combination of replications and null-findings suggest that the left-ward bias in the drawing experiment might be narrowly tied to left-to-right distribution in written language and less to overall prominence. No effect of handedness was observed.

Valence, form, and content of self-talk predict sport type and level of performance

“…The debate on the interdependence of language and cognition has been underway for millennia from Plato in the 5 th century BC over Wilhelm von Humboldt in the 19 th century to most famously Whorfian linguistics in the 20 th -ranging from the claim that language is merely a medium for communicating underlying thoughts between cognitive agents (Fodor, 1975), through it being a social tool for keeping track of other people's mental states (Dunbar, 2003;Tylén et al, 2010), through language being a lingua franca between a number of specialized, quasi-modular central systems (Carruthers, 2002), to thoughts being fundamentally linguistic (Carruthers, 1996). In recent decades, many empirical studies have documented how language is closely intertwined with everything we do and modulates most aspects of behavior and cognition, including eye movements (Tanenhaus et al, 1995;Wallentin et al, 2011), perception of color (Maier & Abdel Rahman, 2018;Regier, Kay, & Khetarpal, 2007;Roberson et al, 2005;Winawer et al, 2007), perception of space (Levinson, 2003;Wallentin et al, 2008), respiration (MacLarnon & Hewitt, 1999), posture (Yardley et al, 1999), conditioning (Phelps, et al, 2001), imagery (Stroustrup & Wallentin, 2018;Wallentin, Rocca, & Stroustrup, 2019) and sleep (Petit et al, 2007). Adding to this, it is increasingly being recognized that whenever we are not engaged in overt linguistic exchange, our heads fill with inner speech and dialogue (Alderson-Day & Fernyhough, 2015).…”

Reflection in Speech of the Individual-Typological Features of Language Personality

“…В меньшей степени изучаются половые (Wallentin, Rocca & Stroustrup, 2019), возрастные (Гордиенко-Митрофанова & Саута, 2016;Kavé et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2019) особенности языковой личности, роль ее мотивационной (Фомина & Рогожкина, 2013;Kim T., Kim Y. & Kim Ji, 2019), эмоциональной (Волженцева, 2016Власова, 2007;Фомина & Леева, 2014), интеллектуальной (Елгина, 2006 сфер; особенности воображения (Zdravković, Jovičić & Gudurić, 2019), памяти (Ishkhanyan, Boye & Mogensen, 2019) Рассмотрено отражение в речевых действиях авторов высказываний их психологических особенностей: мотивационных (по субъективации или объективации действий в ситуации; мотивационно-смысловой направленности стремлений, целей и задач, коммуникативной ориентированности); эмоциональных (по эмоциональной насыщенности и окрашенности текста, смысловых категорий оценочности и размерности); регуляторно-волевых (по волевым усилиям в действиях, стремлениям к их планированию, анализу; экстернальной или интернальной регуляции поведения; последовательности, связности, логичности и целостности текстов, речевому самоконтролю); когнитивных (по общей направленности высказывания на осмысление, анализ или простое описание); операционально-динамических (по их разнообразию, оригинальности); продуктивно-результативных (по успешности речевых действий) (Мирошкина, 1992; Фомина, 2002a, b, 2014, 2016).…”

Facilitation of the Understanding of Novels by Senior Pupils as a Problem of Psycholinguistics

“…Psycholinguistics is based on the understanding of a novel from a philological point of view. Philologists mean a novel as a closed system with a complex internal organization, all elements of which are in close interaction (Jackendoff, 1983;Wallentin, Rocca & Stroustrup, 2019). Characteristic features of the novel are completeness, which is objectifi ed in a form of a written document, literary editing in accordance with the requirements of this type of document, and structural completeness of the text, which implies the presence of a number of special units, united by different types of lexical, grammatical, logical and stylistic meaning.…”