IMPLICIT CAUSALITY IN VERBS: THE ROLE OF COGNITIVE PROGRAMS (original) (raw)

Normative study of the implicit causality of 100 interpersonal verbs in Spanish

Behavior Research Methods, 2008

This study provides normative data on the implicit causality of interpersonal verbs in Spanish. Two experiments were carried out. In Experiment 1, ratings of the implicit causality of 100 verbs classified into four types (agent-patient, agent-evocator, stimulus-experiencer, and experiencer-stimulus) were examined. An offline task was used in which 105 adults and 163 children had to complete sentences containing one verb. Both age and gender effects in the causal biases were examined. In Experiment 2, reading times for sentences containing 60 verbs were analyzed. An online reading task was used in which 34 adults had to read sentences that were both congruent and incongruent with the implicit causality of the verb. The results support the effect of implicit causality in both adults and children, and they support the taxonomy used.

Telling Something we can't Know: Experimental Approaches to Verbs Exhibiting Implicit Causality

Psychological Science, 1995

An interpersonal verb such as annoy or admire can be categorized according to whether its grammatical subject or grammatical object initiates the interaction described by the verb Such a verb can also be categorized according to whether a derived adjective describes its grammatical subject (e g, annoying) or its grammatical object (e g, admirable) Although there has been much speculation (e g, Brown & Fish, 1983) that these and other characteristics of these verbs shed light on basic principles of human social interaction, we argue that research to date has failed to demonstrate directly any real-time consequences of these verbs during language comprehension We present evidence that the initiating-reacting distinction predicts on-line changes in the accessibility of these verbs' arguments, but that the existence of a derived adjective does not We conclude that tasks that question subjects explicitly about language may fail to reflect the ordinary processes of language comprehension

Implicit causality bias in English: a corpus of 300 verbs

Behavior Research Methods, 2010

This study provides implicit verb causality norms for a corpus of 305 English verbs. A web-based sentence completion study was conducted, with 96 respondents completing fragments such as "John liked Mary because..." The resulting bias scores are provided as supplementary material in the Psychonomic Society Archive, where we also present lexical and semantic verb features, such as the frequency, semantic class and emotional valence. Our results replicate those of previous studies with much smaller numbers of verbs and respondents. Novel effects of gender and its interaction with verb valence illustrate the type of issues that can be investigated using stable norms for a large number of verbs. The corpus will facilitate future studies in a range of areas, including psycholinguistics and social psychology.

Implicit Causality in Language: Event Participants and their Interactions

Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2001

This research explored how basic semantic dimensions of evaluation, potency, and activity influence attributions of who causes an interpersonal event. Two experiments examined how the dimensions affected (a) college students’ judgments about which particular social identities were better agents or patients for generic positive and negative actions and (b) their judgments about who caused specific actions described by sentences containing the same identities. The semantic characteristics of the nouns and verbs and “goodness of thematic role” accounted for 44% of the variance in attribution judgments. Experiment 3 examined the effects of evaluation and potency on state verbs. Attributions were again made to the thematic role whose traits matched the valence of the state’s evaluation. More potent subjects and more potent verbs elicited stronger attributions. Thus, basic dimensions of affective meaning that underlie the words used to describe interpersonal interactions help account for ...

The influence of linguistic and cognitive factors on the time course of verb-based implicit causality

Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2016

In three eye-tracking experiments the influence of the Dutch causal connective “want” ( because) and the working memory capacity of readers on the usage of verb-based implicit causality was examined. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that although a causal connective is not required to activate implicit causality information during reading, effects of implicit causality surfaced more rapidly and were more pronounced when a connective was present in the discourse than when it was absent. In addition, Experiment 3 revealed that—in contrast to previous claims—the activation of implicit causality is not a resource-consuming mental operation. Moreover, readers with higher and lower working memory capacities behaved differently in a dual-task situation. Higher span readers were more likely to use implicit causality when they had all their working memory resources at their disposal. Lower span readers showed the opposite pattern as they were more likely to use the implicit causality cue in the ca...

Implicit causality and consequentiality of action verbs

Frontiers in Language Sciences

Investigating Implicit Causality (I-Caus) and Implicit Consequentiality (I-Cons) biases associated with action verbs (e.g., Peter praised/healed Mary because/and so …), this paper sheds light on the nature of the coreference and coherence biases associated with Implicit Causality verbs. We provide evidence in support of the Two-Mechanism Account, according to which I-Caus and I-Cons are driven by two different mechanisms: While I-Caus derives from empty explanatory slots for explanations in verb semantics, I-Cons follows from the general discourse principle of Discourse Contiguity. Evidence is provided by three production experiments in German investigating the coreference and coherence properties of agent-evocator and causative agent-patient verbs (e.g., praise vs. heal), which differ with regard to the availability of explanatory slots for I-Caus. Experiment 1 established I-Caus and I-Cons coreference biases for the two verb classes, while Experiment 2 investigated their correspon...

Implicit causality in Romanian interpersonal verbs

Proceedings of International Conference of Experimental Linguistics

Natural languages display a great variety of devices that may be used to speak of causal relations, ranging from prepositions, sentence connectives and verbs. This paper focuses on the way in which different classes of verbs affect the subsequent discourse in terms of implicit causality. We report on an offline sentence-continuation study that tested next mention preferences triggered by four Romanian classes of verbs and compare them these results with verbal biases observed in other languages.

The Verb–Self Link: An Implicit Association Test Study

Agency is defined as the ability to assign and pursue goals. Given people’s focus on achieving their own goals, agency has been found to be strongly linked to the self. In two studies (N =168), we examined whether this self–agency link is visible from a linguistic perspective. As the preferred grammatical category to convey agency is verbs, we hypothesize that, in the Implicit Association Test (IAT), verbs (vs. nouns) would be associated more strongly with the self (vs. others). Our results confirmed this hypothesis. Participants exhibited particularly fast responses when reading self-related stimuli (e.g., “me” or “my”) and verb stimuli (e.g., “deflect” or “contemplate”) both necessitated pressing an identical rather than different response keys in the IAT (d = .25). The finding connects two streams of literature—on the link between agency and verbs and on the link between self and agency—suggesting a triad between self, agency, and verbs. We argue that this verb–self link (1) open...

Processing Inferential Causal Statements: Theoretical Refinements and the Role of Verb Type

Discourse Processes, 2007

An evidential causal relation like Because most distinguished students got bad grades, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers is more difficult to process than a factual one like Because he got tired after a long semester, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers . Two experiments explored the distinguishing characteristics of different types of causal relations. Experiment 1 introduced a third type of causal relation, a deductive causal relation, like Because grading a paper is a subjective process, the teacher made some mistakes in evaluating his students' papers.