Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?

Rissman, Lilia; Majid, Asifa

doi:10.3758/s13423-019-01634-5

Cited by 59 publications

(55 citation statements)

References 159 publications

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“…Sometimes John, sometimes Bill). Indeed, individual instantiations of the (putative) [EXPERIENCER] [EXPERIENCE] [THEME] construction vary continuously in their grammatical acceptability, speed of processing and production probability (see Ambridge, Bidgood, Pine, Rowland, & Freudenthal, 2016; Bidgood et al, in press, who also find the same for the (putative) [THEME] [EXPERIENCE] [EXPERIENCER] and [AGENT] [ACTION] [PATIENT] constructions, as well as their passive equivalents; see also Rissman & Majid, 2019, for some more general difficulties with the notion of these type of thematic role categories).…”

Section: Sentence-level Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Ambridge

2019

First Language

115

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The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings, (2) morphologically inflected words, (3) n-grams, (4) sentence-level constructions and (5) phonetics and phonology, accounts based on independently-represented abstractions (whether formal rules or prototype categories) fail for two reasons. First, it is not possible to posit abstractions that delineate possible and impossible form; e.g. that (1) rule in pool tables and data tables, but rule out chairs, (2) rule in the past-tense forms netted and bet but rule out * setted and * jet, (3) rule in the bigram f+t but rule out (probabilistically) v+t, (4) rule in both John feared Bill and John frightened Bill but rule out * John laughed Bill, (5) rule in Speaker A but rule out Speaker B as the person who produced a particular word (e.g. Sa’urday). Second, for each domain, empirical data provide evidence of exemplar storage that cannot be captured by putative abstractions: e.g. speakers prefer and/or show an advantage for (1) exemplar variation even within word-meaning ‘category boundaries’, (2) novel inflected forms that are similar to existing exemplars, (3) n-grams that have occurred frequently in the input, (4) SVO sentences with he as SUBJECT and it as OBJECT and (5) repeated productions of ‘the same’ word that are phonologically similar or, better still, identical. An exemplar account avoids an intractable lumping-or-splitting dilemma facing abstraction-based accounts and provides a unitary explanation of language acquisition across all domains; one that is consistent with models and empirical findings from the computational modelling and neuroimaging literature.

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Section: Sentence-level Constructionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Ambridge

2019

First Language

115

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“…In linguistic theory, thematic roles are ranked differently with respect to each other following a Thematic Hierarchy : Agents are considered most prominent, followed by Patients, then Goals, and Instruments are considered least prominent (even though this hierarchy has generated much discussion; Baker, 1997; Jackendoff, 1990; cf. Rissman & Majid, 2019; Rissman & Rawlins, 2017; Rissman, Rawlins, & Landau, 2015). From a linguistic perspective, the Thematic Hierarchy can lead to the expectation that more prominent entities will be mentioned more frequently and in specific syntactic positions (Gernsbacher, 1989; Grosz et al, 1995; Meyer et al, 1988).…”

Section: Event Roles In Language and Cognitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Event Representation to Linguistic Meaning

Ünal

Papafragou

2019

Topics in Cognitive Science

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A fundamental aspect of human cognition is the ability to parse our constantly unfolding experience into meaningful representations of dynamic events and to communicate about these events with others. How do we communicate about events we have experienced? Influential theories of language production assume that the formulation and articulation of a linguistic message is preceded by preverbal apprehension that captures core aspects of the event. Yet the nature of these preverbal event representations and the way they are mapped onto language are currently not well understood. Here, we review recent evidence on the link between event conceptualization and language, focusing on two core aspects of event representation, event roles and event boundaries. Empirical evidence in both domains shows that the cognitive representation of events aligns with the way these aspects of events are encoded in language, providing support for the presence of deep homologies between linguistic and cognitive event structure.

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“…We focus on the understanding of agent-patient relations ("who did what to whom") in visually presented scenes. Identification of thematic relations is critical to understanding and generating sentences (Carlson & Tanenhaus, 1988;Fillmore, 2002;Jackendoff, 1987), but "agent" and "patient" are not exclusively linguistic notions: they likely constitute part of humans' core knowledge (Rissman & Majid, 2019;Spelke & Kinzler, 2007;Strickland, 2017;L. Wagner & Lakusta, 2009) and are integral to visual event processing (Cohn & Paczynski, 2013;Hafri et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The language network is recruited but not required for non-verbal event semantics

Ivanova

Mineroff

Zimmerer

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Consistent with longstanding findings from neuropsychology, several brain regions in left frontal and temporal cortex respond robustly and selectively to language [1]. These regions, often referred to as the "language network", respond more strongly to meaningful stimuli (like words and sentences) than to stimuli devoid of meaning (like pseudowords and Jabberwocky sentences) [2]. But are these regions selectively recruited in processing linguistic meaning? Or do they instead store and/or process complex semantic information independent of its format (sentences or pictures)? In Experiment 1, we scanned participants with fMRI while they performed a semantic plausibility judgment task vs. a difficult perceptual control task on sentences and line drawings that describe/depict simple agent-patient interactions. We found that the language regions responded more strongly when participants performed the semantic task compared to the perceptual task, for both sentences and pictures (although sentences elicited overall stronger responses). Thus, healthy adults engage language regions when processing non-verbal meanings. But is this engagement necessary for understanding pictorial depictions of events? In Experiment 2, we tested two individuals with global aphasia, who have sustained massive damage to perisylvian language areas and display severe language difficulties, together with a group of control participants. Individuals with aphasia were at chance on a task of matching the sentences and pictures. However, they performed close to controls in assessing the plausibility of pictorial depictions of agent-patient interactions. Taken together, these results indicate that the left fronto-temporal language system is recruited but not necessary for processing complex non-verbal meanings.

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Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?

Cited by 59 publications

References 159 publications

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

Against stored abstractions: A radical exemplar model of language acquisition

From Event Representation to Linguistic Meaning

The language network is recruited but not required for non-verbal event semantics

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