Spatial agency bias and word order flexibility: A comparison of 14 European languages

Abstract

The spatial agency bias predicts that people whose native language is rightward written will predominantly envisage action along the same direction. Two mechanisms contribute jointly to this asymmetry: (a) an embodied process related to writing/reading; (b) a linguistic regularity according to which sentence subjects (typically the agent) tend to precede objects (typically the recipient). Here we test a novel hypothesis in relation to the second mechanism, namely, that this asymmetry will be most pronounced in languages with rigid word order. A preregistered study on 14 European languages (n = 420) varying in word order flexibility confirmed a rightward bias in drawings of interactions between two people (agent and recipient). This bias was weaker in more flexible languages, confirming that embodied and linguistic features of language interact in producing it.

(How) Visual properties affect the perception and description of transitive events

“…This is done to account for the often-observed preference to scan pictures from left to right (e.g., Griffin & Bock, 2000), an observation which dates back to Buswell (1935), who was one of the first to report this preference for English speakers. Experimental studies show that literate speakers of European languages place the agent of an event more often to the left of the patient than to the right in drawing tasks (e.g., Chatterjee et al, 1999;Maass & Russo, 2003;Maass et al, 2014;Suitner et al, 2021), are faster in picture matching if the agent is positioned on the left (Chatterjee et al, 1999;Maass & Russo, 2003), preferably map a transitive event description onto a scene with a left-positioned agent (Maass et al, 2014), and indicate a scene with a left-positioned agent as more natural in an aesthetic judgement task than the same scene with a right-positioned agent (Esaulova, Dolscheid, Reuters et al, 2021). Between-language and between-group comparisons suggest that this so-called spatial-agency-bias (SAB) is related to speakers' reading/writing direction (e.g., Dobel, Diesendruck et al, 2007;Esaulova, Dolscheid, Reuters et al, 2021;Maass & Russo, 2003; but see Altmann et al, 2006) and may be further modulated by word order specifics (Maass et al, 2014;Suitner et al, 2021).…”

“…Experimental studies show that literate speakers of European languages place the agent of an event more often to the left of the patient than to the right in drawing tasks (e.g., Chatterjee et al, 1999;Maass & Russo, 2003;Maass et al, 2014;Suitner et al, 2021), are faster in picture matching if the agent is positioned on the left (Chatterjee et al, 1999;Maass & Russo, 2003), preferably map a transitive event description onto a scene with a left-positioned agent (Maass et al, 2014), and indicate a scene with a left-positioned agent as more natural in an aesthetic judgement task than the same scene with a right-positioned agent (Esaulova, Dolscheid, Reuters et al, 2021). Between-language and between-group comparisons suggest that this so-called spatial-agency-bias (SAB) is related to speakers' reading/writing direction (e.g., Dobel, Diesendruck et al, 2007;Esaulova, Dolscheid, Reuters et al, 2021;Maass & Russo, 2003; but see Altmann et al, 2006) and may be further modulated by word order specifics (Maass et al, 2014;Suitner et al, 2021). 1 Literate speakers of Non-European languages such as Hebrew (Dobel, Diesendruck et al, 2007) or Arabic (Esaulova, Dolscheid, Reuters et al, 2021;Maass & Russo, 2003;Maass et al, 2014), who are familiar with a script that is written from right to left, have been found to display the reverse bias.…”

“…Taken together, the findings from non-verbal tasks reveal that agents are typically associated with a certain position in the scene. For German, the language under investigation in this paper, the position of the agent is typically associated with the position to the left of the patient in transitive events (Esaulova, Dolscheid, Reuters et al, 2021;Suitner et al, 2021) and ditransitive events (Dobel, Diesendruck et al, 2007). German is a language with a left-to-right script that places subjects before objects when following the pragmatically unmarked word order (e.g., Bader & Häussler, 2010).…”

“…Although effects might be more subtle in other experimental settings, we argue that the findings from this study have implications for psycholinguistic research in more general and are relevant for a range of tasks that use visual materials. Since the SAB, although to varying degrees (Suitner et al, 2021), appears to be quite persistent in literate speakers of European languages, we need to assume that experiments with visual materials run at risk when not controlling for agent and patient position and orientation in their design. On the other hand, the purposeful application of the prominence-lending factors position and orientation in experimental designs may also serve to facilitate, for example, sentence-picture matching.…”

Effects of agent position and orientation on perception and production

“…For example, researchers have investigated for a range of languages which information sources listeners use to identify the agent. Interestingly, non-verbal tasks reveal that people draw on their linguistic knowledge (word order specifics) and reading/writing habits even when perceiving or envisaging an event in which an agent acts upon a patient (e.g., Esaulova et al, 2021;Suitner et al, 2021).…”