Psych verbs, the linking problem, and the acquisition of language

Hartshorne, Joshua K.; O’Donnell, Timothy J.; Sudo, Yuichi; Uruwashi, Miki; Lee, Miseon; Snedeker, Jesse

doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2016.08.008

Cited by 16 publications

(17 citation statements)

References 93 publications

(104 reference statements)

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“…Turning now to the findings of interest, the main effect of semantics was significant, indicating that—for active and passive sentences alike—reaction time decreases as semantic affectedness increases. Thus again, the findings are indicative of a general dispreference for verbs that reverse canonical marking (i.e., experiencer‐theme verbs), even for active sentences (e.g., Messenger et al., ; Hartshorne & Snedeker, ; Hartshorne et al., in press; Hartshorne, O'Donnell, Sudo, Uruwashi & Snedeker, submitted). Crucially, however, the significant interaction of the semantic predictor by sentence type indicates that affectedness has a greater effect on speeding up reaction times for passive than active sentences.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 80%

“…This suggests that participants do not have difficulty with experiencer‐theme PASSIVES, but with experiencer‐theme VERBS. Presumably this difficulty arises because experiencer‐theme verbs reverse the canonical role assignment exemplified by agent‐patient and theme‐experiencer verbs (see Hartshorne, Pogue, & Snedeker, ; Hartshorne & Snedeker, ; Hartshorne et al., submitted), and are also more difficult to illustrate and interpret in a picture‐matching task. Note that none of the previous comprehension studies reviewed above included these crucial active control sentences.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Is Passive Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence From Adult Grammaticality Judgment and Comprehension Studies

et al. 2015

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To explain the phenomenon that certain English verbs resist passivization (e.g., *£5 was cost by the book), Pinker (1989) proposed a semantic constraint on the passive in the adult grammar: The greater the extent to which a verb denotes an action where a patient is affected or acted upon, the greater the extent to which it is compatible with the passive. However, a number of comprehension and production priming studies have cast doubt upon this claim, finding no difference between highly affecting agent‐patient/theme‐experiencer passives (e.g., Wendy was kicked/frightened by Bob) and non‐actional experiencer theme passives (e.g., Wendy was heard by Bob). The present study provides evidence that a semantic constraint is psychologically real, and is readily observed when more fine‐grained independent and dependent measures are used (i.e., participant ratings of verb semantics, graded grammaticality judgments, and reaction time in a forced‐choice picture‐matching comprehension task). We conclude that a semantic constraint on the passive must be incorporated into accounts of the adult grammar.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 80%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is Passive Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence From Adult Grammaticality Judgment and Comprehension Studies

et al. 2015

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“…Evaluations share properties with beliefs, desires, and emotions, but can be distinguished from each of them. They tend to be judged as more habitual or long-lasting than emotions (Hartshorne et al, 2016), and also as more abstract (e.g., unlike emotions, evaluative attitudes are rarely described as being instantiated in a concrete time and place; Pylkkanen, 1999). Unlike desires, they do not pertain to an unfulfilled state.…”

Section: Control As It Pertains To Different Mental State Kindsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lay beliefs about the controllability of everyday mental states.

Cusimano¹,

Goodwin²

2019

Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

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Prominent accounts of folk theory of mind posit that people judge others' mental states to be uncontrollable, unintentional, or otherwise involuntary. Yet, this claim has little empirical support: few studies have investigated lay judgments about mental state control, and those that have done so yield conflicting conclusions. We address this shortcoming across six studies, which show that, in fact, lay people attribute to others a high degree of intentional control over their mental states, including their emotions, desires, beliefs, and evaluative attitudes. For prototypical mental states, people's judgments of control systematically varied by mental state category (e.g., emotions were seen as less controllable than desires, which in turn were seen as less controllable than beliefs and evaluative attitudes). However, these differences were attenuated, sometimes completely, when the content of and context for each mental state were tightly controlled. Finally, judgments of control over mental states correlated positively with judgments of responsibility and blame for them, and to a lesser extent, with judgments that the mental state reveals the agent's character. These findings replicated across multiple populations and methods, and generalized to people's real-world experiences. The present results challenge the view that people judge others' mental states as passive, involuntary, or unintentional, and suggest that mental state control judgments play a key role in other important areas of social judgment and decision making.

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“…This creates semantic roles existing at a broader level of description than classic categories like agent and patient (See Dowty, 1991;Van Valin Jr. & Van Valin, 2005;Levin & Rappaport-Hovav, 2005). Though there may good reason to additionally expect narrower semantic roles that further differentiate the experiencer of experiencer-object and experiencer-subject sentences (and likewise for the stimulus) (Belletti & Rizzi, 1988;Hartshorne et al, 2016;Ziegler & Snedeker, 2018), here, we focus on the abstract semantic features that are shared. For example, this model would group "the hawk approached the cow"…”

Section: Semantic and Syntactic Structure Of The Verbsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Two Ways to Build a Thought: Distinct Forms of Compositional Semantic Representation Across Brain Regions

Frankland¹,

Greene²

2019

Preprint

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To understand a simple sentence such as “the woman chased the dog”, the human mind must dynamically organize the relevant concepts to represent who did what to whom. This structured re-combination of concepts (woman, dog, chased) enables the representation of novel events, and is thus a central feature of intelligence. Here, we use fMRI and encoding models to delineate the contributions of three brain regions to the representation of structured, relational combinations. We identify a region of rostral-medial prefrontal cortex (rmPFC) that shares representations of noun-verb conjunctions across sentences: for example, combining “woman” and “chased” to encode woman-as-chaser, distinct from woman-as-chasee. This PFC region differs from the left-mid superior temporal cortex (lmSTC) and hippocampus, two regions previously implicated in representing relations. lmSTC represents broad role combinations that are shared across verbs (e.g., woman-as-agent), rather than narrow roles, limited to specific actions (woman-as-chaser). By contrast, a hippocampal sub-region represents instances of recurring noun-verb conjunctions as dissimilar to one another, and is anti-correlated with rMPFC on a trial-by-trial basis, consistent with a pattern separation mechanism. These three regions appear to play distinct, but complementary, roles in encoding compositional event structure.

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Psych verbs, the linking problem, and the acquisition of language

Cited by 16 publications

References 93 publications

Is Passive Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence From Adult Grammaticality Judgment and Comprehension Studies

Is Passive Syntax Semantically Constrained? Evidence From Adult Grammaticality Judgment and Comprehension Studies

Lay beliefs about the controllability of everyday mental states.

Two Ways to Build a Thought: Distinct Forms of Compositional Semantic Representation Across Brain Regions

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