Transitivity, Space, and Hand: The Spatial Grounding of Syntax

Abstract

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left-to-right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a novel method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect.

Grammar, Gender and Demonstratives in Lateralized Imagery for Sentences

“…We found no evidence that biomechanical constraints, such as handedness, play a role in the distribution of figures in the drawings. This is to some extent contrary to previous research that has found that hand use in right-handers interacts with drawing and sentence comprehension (Boiteau & Almor, 2017;Braswell & Rosengren, 2002), e.g. righthanders have been observed to draw from left to right when asked to draw with their right hand, but from right to left when drawing with their left hand (Braswell & Rosengren, 2002) and it has also been observed that the left hand is more sensitive to agent/patiant biases during a sentence comprehension task (Boiteau & Almor, 2017).…”

“…Exposure to language and linguistic structure, both written and spoken, modulates cognitive functions that have hitherto been considered non-linguistic (Athanasopoulos et al, 2015;Boiteau & Almor, 2017;Chatterjee, Southwood, & Basilico, 1999;Coventry, Griffiths, & Hamilton, 2014;Dobel, Diesendruck, & Bölte, 2007;Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010;Gudde, Coventry, & Engelhardt, 2016;Hendricks & Boroditsky, 2017;Kranjec, Lehet, Bromberger, & Chatterjee, 2010;Levinson, 2003;A Maass & Russo, 2003;Román, El Fathi, & Santiago, 2013;Stroustrup & Wallentin, 2018;Tylén, Weed, Wallentin, Roepstorff, & Frith, 2010;Winawer et al, 2007).…”

“…Participants were faster at picture-sentence matching if images have left-to-right implied motion and if the agent was depicted on the left. This bias has since been interpreted to be related to reading direction (Boiteau & Almor, 2017;Dobel et al, 2007;Fuhrman & Boroditsky, 2010;A Maass & Russo, 2003;Anne Maass, Suitner, & Nadhmi, 2014;Román et al, 2013). A simple way to study this influence on imagery is to ask participants to make drawings of linguistic content (Dobel et al, 2007;A Maass & Russo, 2003;Stroustrup & Wallentin, 2018).…”

Embodied Simulations Are Modulated by Sentential Perspective

“…For both active and passive reversible sentences, WH was unable to map agents/patients onto grammatical subjects/objects. He, however, performed at ceiling when actions were depicted going from left to right for active sentences, and from right to left for passive sentences (see also Boiteau & Almor, ). A similar spatiotemporal bias in thematic role assignment has been observed in healthy subjects.…”

Syntax response–space biases for hands, not feet

“…Later evidence showed that this effect results from a combination of the orthographic direction of one's native language (where the effect is reversed in Arabic speakers) and a general advantage for responding to images with left-to-right moving action that is independent of language (Maass & Russo, 2003). Recently, Boiteau and Almor (2016) showed that a left-side advantage for agents (in an American-Englishspeaking population) occurs in purely verbal tasks and is therefore not restricted to cases that involve pictorial representation of linguistic descriptions. In the present article, we ask whether this effect is part of a larger phenomenon characterizing lateral biases in nonspatial cognition or whether this effect is specific to language.…”