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Representations of abstract thematic roles outside language in infants and adults
Poster A107 in Poster Session A, Tuesday, October 24, 10:15 am - 12:00 pm CEST, Espace Vieux-Port
Jean-Remy Hochmann1, Sofie Vettori2, Liuba PAPEO3; 1CNRS – UMR5229 - Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, 2Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1
Thematic roles are key linguistic constructs underlying the representation of structured events, in syntax and semantics. We investigated the origins of two major roles – agent marking who does the action, and patient, marking who undergoes the action – outside of the language faculty with a switch-cost task tapping automatic implicit processes in adults (Experiment 1), and two studies with preverbal 7-month-old infants using a habituation paradigm relying on looking time measures (Experiment 2) and an oddball paradigm relying on pupillometry (Experiment 3), respectively. In Experiments 2-3, we investigated how 7-month-old infants encode visual scenes involving two people, an agent-like and a patient-like actor, and whether they spontaneously assign actors to abstract agent/patient role categories. Stimuli featured two individuals, with the purported agent (e.g., a female), leaning forward in a dynamic posture, and the purported patient (e.g., a male) in a less dynamic or static body posture. In Experiment 1 (habituation), infants saw a sequence of up to twelve images presenting the same two individuals, always in different postures but with consistent role assignment as defined by the posture. When infants’ reduced looking times signaled habituation, two types of novel images were shown, in which the same two individuals in two novel postures either kept their previous roles or switched roles. In Experiment 2, images of dyads were presented in a pseudo-random order. While body postures, and therefore the type of interaction, changed all the time, role assignment was consistent in the majority (83%) of images and changed in the remaining (deviant) images (17%). We measured surprise to role switch, in the form of dishabituation (increase in looking time after habituation; Bailllargeon, Spelke & Wasserman, 1985) in Experiment 1, and pupil dilation (Hochmann & Papeo, 2014; Hochmann & Toro, 2021) in Experiment 2. Finally, the purpose of the agent and patient thematic roles is to generate a relational structure, where the agent acts on the patient. In consequence, we predicted and verified that surprise reactions to role switch, signaling the assignment of abstract agent and patient roles, preferentially happen in a relational context, i.e., when the two individuals in each stimulus faced each-other, as if interacting, rather than in a situation where the two individuals were positioned back to back (Goupil, Hochmann & Papeo, 2022; Papeo, 2020; Zhou et al., 2019). Overall, remarkably congruent results demonstrate that preverbal infants, like adults, can represent the abstract roles agent and patient, which they systematically and automatically assign to actors across very different events, depending on visual cues including posture and position. Role assignment in infants signals a combinatorial capacity that precedes language development, and is key to the productivity and compositionality of human language and cognition. These empirical studies promote the view that the characteristics of natural languages derive from the structured thoughts of the non-verbal/preverbal mind.
Topic Areas: Language Development/Acquisition,