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Syntactic biases in intentionality judgments| old_uid | 14100 |
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| title | Syntactic biases in intentionality judgments |
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| start_date | 2014/06/05 |
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| schedule | 17h-18h30 |
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| online | no |
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| summary | Do syntactic categories automatically influence intentionality judgments? Strickland et al (2014) demonstrated that, indeed, under time pressure people tend to treat the grammatical subject of a sentence as acting more intentionally than the object (while when not under time pressure, no such influences operate). In this work, we explore whether this bias is only a matter of a sentence's surface form or if it is linked to its deep syntactic structure. To test this question, we conducted an in-lab and an online experiment. In both experiments, participants were asked to judge the intentionality of the argument of unaccusative and ergative verbs in French. The preliminary results show that participants tend to treat the argument of unergative verbs (deep subject) as acting more intentionally than the argument of unaccusative verbs (deep object). Interestingly, when under time pressure, the effect appears more clearly in terms of accuracy in the first experiment and in terms of reaction time in the online experiment. |
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| responsibles | Strickland |
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