Edited by: Rick Thomas, Georgia Institute of Technology, United States
Reviewed by: Juergen Bohnemeyer, University at Buffalo, United States; Eddy J. Davelaar, Birkbeck University of London, United Kingdom
*Correspondence: Andrea Bender
This article was submitted to Cognitive Science, a section of the journal Frontiers in Psychology
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Linguistic cues may be considered a potent tool for focusing attention on causes or effects. In this paper, we explore how different cues affect causal assignments in German and Tongan. From a larger screening study, two parts are reported here: Part 1 dealt with syntactic variations, including word order (agent vs. patient in first/subject position) and case marking (e.g., as ergative vs. non-ergative in Tongan) depending on verb type (transitive vs. intransitive). For two physical settings (wood floating on water and a man breaking a glass), participants assigned causality to the two entities involved. In the floating setting, speakers of the two languages were sensitive to syntactic variations, but differed in the entity regarded as causative. In the breaking setting, the human agent was uniformly regarded as causative. Part 2 dealt with implicit verb causality. Participants assigned causality to subject or object of 16 verbs presented in minimal social scenarios. In German, all verbs showed a subject (agent) focus; in Tongan, the focus depended on the verb; and for nine verbs, the focus differed across languages. In conclusion, we discuss the question of domain-specificity of causal cognition, the role of the ergative as causal marker, and more general differences between languages.
Physical situations look the same all over the world. They follow invariable laws of nature and appear to be open to direct inspection, irrespective of the culture or language of a potential observer. But do people
Previous research points to a small number of factors that—even within cultural and/or linguistic groups—may affect causal cognition, not only in the social domain but also in the physical domain: biases in assigning causality, specific causal concepts, and linguistic cues. The first group of these factors generally skews the assignment of causality a priori: The causal asymmetry bias (White,
Besides such distinct cues from within a given language, however, diverging properties of different languages might also play a role in shifting attention in a specific manner. Cross-linguistic studies reveal that languages differ in how they encode information about causal relations and events (e.g., Ikegami,
Mainstream research is still guided by the wide-spread assumption that causal cognition tends to be universal, specifically in the physical domain. Given the resultant shortage in empirical evidence, we conducted a screening study with the main purpose of exploring potential cultural and linguistic impacts on causal cognition in the physical domain (Bender and Beller,
Linguistic descriptions have long been known to affect how people represent a described event—even when they eye-witnessed it themselves (e.g., Loftus and Palmer,
In principle, a causal relationship can be understood as an event, caused by one entity (the
When translating a causal relationship into language, the notion of causality can be linguistically encoded in numerous ways and across different elements of a clause, for instance in syntactic categories such as subject, in verb semantics, in morphology, in resultative constructions, or in animacy distinctions as coded in noun phrases (for examples, see Duranti and Ochs,
The structure of a sentence is determined, at least to a considerable extent, by its core component: the verb. For our purpose, two types of verbs will be contrasted:
Categorization of subject and object in nominative-accusative languages and ergative-absolutive languages, with examples from German and Tongan (adapted from Bender and Beller,
In
From a propositional point of view, S2, S3, and the respective ergative sentence S5 are equivalent. Yet, S3 is marked by the passive voice (in contrast to the unmarked active voice in S2), while its complement in an ergative-absolutive language (S5) is marked by the ergative case of the transitive subject (in contrast to the unmarked absolutive case of intransitive subjects and transitive objects). In other words, nominative-accusative languages categorize according to
Only a small number of studies have so far examined the cognitive implications of these syntactic variations. For instance, Goldin-Meadow (
Now, if speakers of ergative languages are, by default, largely content with providing and receiving information about the action and the entity affected, then introducing a transitive agent and marking him or her with the ergative case by way of exception might serve as a particularly potent tool for agency assignment. A cross-linguistic experiment (Beller et al.,
Assignment of causality in Part 1 on syntactic variations. The data presented in
However, due to the different structures of the languages, the two sentences were not entirely comparable. More specifically, in order to keep word order constant across languages, the transitive construction in German had to be phrased with the (marked) passive voice. Adding an (unmarked) active phrasing that allows us to disentangle their relative effects would thus be required to justify any strong conclusion.
Two further reservations may be raised with regard to this previous study: First, it used a forced-choice response format, which may have distorted responses in an unintended way. Second, and more importantly, the floating setting is purely physical and symmetric; assigning the thematic role of the agent to either entity involved may therefore be problematic. With the data reported in this article, we aim to remedy these reservations by comparing responses assessed using the forced-choice format with responses assessed using an analog rating scale, and by comparing a purely physical setting with a setting that involves a human agent.
This latter setting also allows us to contrast agentive phrasings with a non-agentive phrasing (Hare et al.,
Importantly, though, by virtue of its subject position, people might be willing to consider the affected entity to be the “agent” of the intransitive verb, and might thus assign more causality to it. If this tendency is further emphasized by case marking, it should be stronger in nominative-accusative languages, which shift “the glass” from (accusative) object to (nominative) subject, than in ergative-absolutive languages, in which “the glass” remains in the absolutive case.
Assigning causal roles to the entities involved in a specific relation is likely the most relevant objective in identifying its causal structure. While this seems to prioritize the entities as the main source of information relevant for role assignment, the relation itself and its linguistic representation through a specific verb plays an equally important, albeit perhaps more subtle, role in this process—and again, Loftus and Palmer's (
Since Abelson and Kanouse (
This difference in focus on subject vs. object can be used to establish taxonomies of interpersonal verbs, first in
Given our primary interest in physical causality, our intention with the study reported below was not to systematically explore verb causality in German and Tongan (for respective studies on German see, e.g., Fiedler and Semin,
The data presented in the current article were collected as part of a larger screening, which aimed at exploring the potential influences of culture on causal cognition and consisted of several sections. One section of the screening asked participants to assign causality in a range of purely physical, symmetric settings, varying content and focus (reported in Bender and Beller,
The two linguistic objectives of the screening, which are the subject of the current article, will be referred to as Part 1 (syntactic variations) and Part 2 (implicit verb causality), respectively.
The tasks in Part 1 aimed at assessing how syntactic variations affect the assignment of causality. The prime goal was to replicate a main finding of a previous study (Beller et al.,
Part 2 aimed at assessing how verb semantics affect the assignment of causality. Given that implicit verb causality has never before been investigated for a Polynesian language like Tongan, we also intended to probe the potential of cross-linguistic variability in this regard. Specifically, we wanted to explore whether verbs that could be used to describe (symmetric) physical relations exhibit a subject or object focus in the first place, and do so distinctively in different languages. For verbs focusing on social events related to the Tongan obligation to help (
In this part, two physical settings were used: Wood floating and a glass breaking. For each setting, four syntactic variants were constructed by crossing
Syntactic variants used in Part 1 on syntactic variations (with English translations).
Transitive (carrying) | (1) The fact that water carries wood, … |
(2) The fact that wood is carried by water, … |
Intransitive (floating) | (3) The fact that water lets wood float, … |
(4) The fact that wood floats on water, … |
Transitive (breaking1) | (5) The fact that the man breaks the glass, … |
(6) The fact that the glass is broken by the man, … |
Intransitive (breaking2); |
(7) *The fact that the glass breaks to the man, … |
|
Intransitive (breaking2); |
(8) The fact that the glass breaks, … |
For the floating setting, a purely physical setting without a human agent, the following variants were used:
Transitive, agent first/subject: “Water carries wood.” (1) Transitive, patient first/subject: “Wood is carried by water.” (2) Intransitive, agent first/subject (split agency): “Water lets wood float.” (3) Intransitive, patient first/subject: “Wood floats on water.” (4)
As not all combinations of verb type and word order could be filled with a one-verb phrasing, we decided to choose a construction with “let” that splits agency for variant (3):
Three of the Tongan sentences required an ergative construction: The split agency phrasing (3) and the transitive phrasing (1), both of which emphasize the agent by word order and subject position, but also the transitive phrasing (2) that emphasizes the patient. The reason for this is that the passive transformation used in English and German to implement variant (2) is not possible in Tongan; the closest we can get is a phrasing as in (1), yet with reversed word order (Churchward,
For the breaking setting, the following four variants were used, three of which explicated a human agent:
Transitive, agent first/subject: “The man breaks the glass.” (5) Transitive, patient first/subject: “The glass is broken by the man.” (6) Intransitive, patient first/subject (patient shift): “*The glass breaks to the man.” (7) Intransitive, patient first/subject (non-agentive): “The glass breaks.” (8)
One slot (intransitive verb with agent in first/subject position) was again impossible to fill. For explorative purposes, we therefore decided to include construction (7) with the patient in first/subject position for which German marks the agent by the
Two of the Tongan sentences required an ergative construction (one, again, because the passive used in German is not possible in Tongan): The transitive phrasing (5) in which word order and subject position emphasized the agent, but also the transitive phrasing (6) in which the two factors emphasized the patient.
“The fact that water carries wood is basically due to … the water |----------------------------| the wood.” German: “Dass Wasser Holz trägt, liegt vor allem … am Wasser |----------------------------| am Holz.” Tongan: “'Oku ave 'e he vai 'a e papa, ko e tupu mei … he vai |----------------------------| he papa.”
In the floating setting, causal assignments were assessed with an analog rating scale of 10 cm length, which allowed for the allocation of relative causal effectiveness. Each side of the scale was labeled with one of the two entities “the water/the wood.”
The four syntactic variants of the breaking setting were implemented each in two assessment versions: first with a forced-choice format that simply required participants to decide which of the two entities in question is the main cause for the overall event (e.g., “…□ the man; □ the glass.”), and second with an analog rating scale of 10 cm length in order to assess the relative causal effectiveness of the two entities (as in the example above). For all variants involving a person—phrasings (5), (6), and (7)—the entities were “the man/the glass” (German:
This part aimed at assessing how the verb itself—in the absence of any context information—affects causal assignments. It comprised 16 verbs, which are presented in Table
List of verbs used in Part 2 on verb semantics (with English translations).
1 | [S] attracts [O]. | [S] zieht [O] an. | Tohoaki'i 'e [S] e tokanga 'a [O]. |
2 | [S] interrupts [O]. | [S] unterbricht [O]. | Fakaheleleu 'a [S] kia [O]. |
3 | [S] resembles [O]. | [S] ähnelt [O]. | To'onga tatau 'a [S] mo [O]. |
4 | [S] repels [O]. | [S] stößt [O] ab. | Fakafepaki 'a [S] kia [O]. |
5 | [S] approaches [O]. | [S] nähert sich [O]. | Fakaofiofi 'a [S] kia [O]. |
6 | [S] distracts [O]. | [S] lenkt [O] ab. | Uesia 'e [S] e tokanga 'a [O]. |
7 | [S] pushes [O] forward. | [S] schiebt [O] nach vorne. | Teke'i 'e [S] 'a [O] ki mu'a. |
8 | [S] lets [O] swim. | [S] läßt [O] schwimmen. | Tukuange 'e [S] ke kakau 'a [O]. |
9 | [S] carries [O]. | [S] trägt [O]. | Fua 'e [S] 'a [O]. |
10 | [S] stops [O]. | [S] stoppt [O]. | Ta'ofi 'e [S] 'a [O]. |
11 | [S] displaces [O]. | [S] verdrängt [O]. | Fetongi 'e [S] 'a [O]. |
12 | [S] hits [O]. | [S] stößt [O] an. | Tā'i 'e [S] 'a [O]. |
A | [S] gives [O] a book as a present. | [S] schenkt [O] ein Buch. | 'Oange 'e [S] 'a e tohi ko e me'a'ofa kia [O]. |
B | [S] gives [O] a picture. | [S] gibt [O] ein Bild. | Foaki 'e [S] 'a e fakatÄtātā'a [O]. |
C | [S] offers [O] some cake. | [S] bietet [O] Kuchen an. | 'Oange 'e [S] 'a e me'i keke 'a [O]. |
D | [S] helps [O] with the work. | [S] hilft [O] bei der Arbeit. | Tokoni 'a [S] kia [O] ki he ngāue. |
“Peter carries Anna. This is surely due to Peter |------------------| Anna.” German: “Peter trägt Anna. Das liegt sicher an Peter |------------------| Anna.” Tongan: “Fua 'e Pita 'a 'Ana. 'Oku mahino ko e tupu mei Pita |------------------| 'Ana.”
The roles [S] and [O] were replaced by proper names that are common in the respective languages. Causal assignments were assessed with an analog rating scale of 5 cm length. The subject [S] was always placed on the left side of the scale and the object [O] on the right side to ensure coherence with the word order in the sentences.
The German sample consisted of 93 students from the University of Freiburg (36 male, 56 female [1 did not indicate his or her gender]; mean age 23.7 years,
Please note that, although the German participants are older than the Tongan ones, the two samples are roughly comparable in terms of education level, as most German participants were shortly after the exams that qualify for university entry, while the Tongan ones were shortly before these exams. Potential implications of the age difference are picked up in the discussion.
Although our university ethics board only deals with medical research, we can confirm that we follow the Frankfurt declaration of ethical conduct for anthropological research, which addresses all stages of the research project from designing to reporting the research.
The study was implemented as a paper-and-pencil questionnaire. The questionnaire always began with general instructions, followed by one task from the breaking setting in forced-choice format. This task was followed by the block of tasks on the content and focus variations reported in Bender and Beller (
This order of tasks was chosen for three reasons: (a) The two tasks from the breaking setting each participant had to work on were separated from one another maximally in order to minimize (trivial) transfer effects. (b) The task with the forced-choice format always preceded those with rating format, because the former used the more coarse-grained measure. (c) Finally, in the succession of tasks with rating format, the task from the floating setting was always presented before the second task from the breaking setting, because the latter introduced a human agent, and we tried to prevent possible carry-over effects from the setting richer in information to the setting with less information.
The four tasks of the breaking setting with forced-choice format varied between subjects, and the same applied for the four tasks of the floating setting and the four tasks of the breaking setting with rating format. All possible task combinations were implemented, with one constraint: When participants had received an agentive version for the first assessment of the breaking setting, that is, phrasing (5), (6), or (7), they then did not receive the non-agentive version (8) for the second assessment, in order, again, to prevent possible carry-over effects from the information-rich setting.
The order of the response options in the forced-choice format and the orientation of the rating scale in the rating format were balanced across conditions. In the non-agentive version (8), half of the participants received a personal option (“somebody unknown”) and the other half a non-personal option (“something unknown”) as alternative to “the glass.”
The tasks of Part 2 on verb semantics (see Table
Participants were randomly assigned to the different versions of the questionnaire. They were instructed to respond spontaneously and were given as much time as they needed.
The data and findings are presented and discussed in the following order: First, we analyse the data from Part 1 on the effects of the syntactic variations and possible language differences, beginning with the floating setting, followed by the breaking setting. We then turn to Part 2 and compare implicit verb causality across languages and stimuli, before briefly addressing some possible reservations.
Participants' causal assignments were coded by measuring their marks on the rating scale accurate to 0.5 mm ranging from 0 cm (0% wood) when the mark was precisely on the endpoint labeled with “water,” to 10 cm (or 100% wood) when the mark was precisely on the endpoint labeled with “wood.” Accordingly, values above 50% indicate a stronger causal role of the patient (wood) and values below 50% indicate a stronger causal role of the agent (water).
With the floating setting, we aimed at assessing effects of syntactic variations on causality assignments within and across two languages in a purely physical setting without a human agent. The descriptions used either a transitive or an intransitive verb and emphasized either the agent or the patient by word order and subject position, respectively. Across languages, we found an overall preference for the patient (wood) as causative in Germany and for the agent (water) in Tonga as well as significant effects of word order and verb type. Within languages, we found a somewhat stronger preference for the agent if emphasized by word order (in German) or in transitive phrasings (in Tongan) than in the respective complementary conditions (Figure
An analysis of variance with
Aggregated across conditions, the German participants preferred the patient/wood as causative for the floating with an average rating of 62.2% (95% CI: 55.0; 69.4), whereas the Tongan participants preferred the agent/water as causative with an average rating of 68.3% (corresponding to 31.7% wood [26.3; 36.9]). Given that the relation under consideration is physically symmetric, implying equal contribution of the two entities, both the Tongan and the German response patterns exhibit an asymmetry, albeit in diverging directions. This finding is largely consistent with previous results obtained using the forced-choice response format (Beller et al.,
Beyond that, the two linguistic variations probed within each language—word order and verb type—also affected causal assignments: Emphasizing the agent by word order/subject position resulted in a preference for the agent/water as causative (59.0%; corresponding to 41.0% wood [95% CI: 34.7; 47.3]), while emphasizing the patient/wood resulted in a balanced rating centered around the midpoint of the scale (53.0% wood [46.7; 59.2]). A similar preference for the agent/water was found for transitive verbs (58.3%; corresponding to 41.7% wood [35.4; 47.9]), while using an intransitive verb resulted in a balanced rating (52.3% wood [46.0; 58.6]). The impact of linguistic cues is thus not restricted to Tongan, as was observed previously (Beller et al.,
However, word order and verb type seem to play different roles in the two languages and to contribute differently to the overall effects, as indicated by a separate analysis of variance for each language: Word order played a significant role in German [
The exploratory intransitive (and in Tongan partly ergative) phrasing (3) was assumed to split agency assignment, leaving parts of the agency with the wood (for floating) and assigning the remainder to the water (for enabling the wood to float). And in fact, in both languages, the causal assignment for phrasing (3) falls between the average levels reached for the intransitive phrasing (4) with patient (wood) in first/subject position and the transitive phrasing (1) with agent (water) in first/subject position.
Finally, the two transitive ergative phrasings in Tongan (1 and 2) elicited, as expected, a strong preference for the agent (the water) as causative (76.0%; corresponding to 24.0% wood) as compared to the intransitive, non-ergative phrasing (4), which elicited a rather balanced rating [44.9% wood;
The breaking setting differed from the floating setting mainly insofar as it involved a proper agent (a man) in an otherwise physical setting (a glass breaking) in three of the four linguistic variants. It aimed at testing whether the presence of such an agent affects the pattern in causal assignments found in the floating setting. The specific event was described either by using a transitive or an intransitive construction, three of these emphasizing the glass by word order and subject position—phrasings (5), (6), and (7)—and one emphasizing the man (8). Causal assignments were assessed with two different tasks per person, the first using a forced-choice format and the second a rating format. As can be seen in Figures
In a preliminary step, we checked for the non-agentive variant (8) whether it made a difference how the response option that was provided as alternative to the glass was formulated: personal as “somebody unknown” or non-personal as “something unknown.” This was not the case. A log-linear analysis (Kennedy,
Similar to the floating setting, the event was described using transitive vs. intransitive constructions, but this time, we had three versions that emphasized the glass (by word order and subject position) and only one that emphasized the man. To test the four syntactic variants for differences, we therefore performed a log-linear analysis with only the two independent variables
Participants largely preferred the agent/the man and not the patient/the glass as causative albeit to a differing extent across the four syntactic variations: phrasing (5) 10.7% glass; phrasing (6) 11.7% glass; phrasing (7) 10.3% glass; phrasing (8) 35.4% glass (see Figure
Participants' causal assignments were coded by measuring their marks on the scale accurate to 0.5 mm, ranging from 0 cm (0% glass), when the mark was precisely on the endpoint labeled with “the man” or “somebody/something unknown,” to 10 cm (or 100% glass), when the mark was precisely on the endpoint labeled with “the glass.” Accordingly, values above 50% indicate a stronger causal role of the patient/the glass and values below 50% indicate a stronger causal role of the (possible) agent/the man or somebody/something unknown.
Again, we checked in a preliminary step for the non-agentive variant (8) whether responses depended on how the alternative response option to the glass was formulated: personal or non-personal. This was not the case. An analysis of variance with
To test the four syntactic variants for differences, we performed an analysis of variance with two independent variables,
Similarly to the forced-choice data, yet slightly less extremely, participants mostly preferred the agent (the man) and not the patient (the glass) as causative, albeit to a differing extent across the four syntactic variations: phrasing (5) 21.6% glass [95% CI: 13.1; 30.1]; phrasing (6) 25.4% glass [16.9; 34.0]; phrasing (7) 20.4% glass [11.9; 28.9]; phrasing (8) 37.1% glass [30.7; 43.6] (see Figure
With one exception, German and Tongans alike assigned prime causality to the person involved and not to the object. Similarly, with one exception, none of the linguistic variations had any effect. The exception to both overall patterns is the non-agentive phrasing (8) which led a substantial proportion of our German participants to switch their causal assignment from the human agent to the patient, while it did not affect the response of our Tongan participants at all. This latter finding implies that ergativity had no effect in this case. The German pattern is thus consistent with findings reported by Fausey and Boroditsky (
At first glance, the German pattern is also consistent with our assumption put forward above that shifting the patient (i.e., the glass) to the subject position in phrasing (8), marked by the nominative case in German, may endow it with agent-like properties and hence be responsible for this switch in causal assignment. This interpretation is weakened, however, by the results of phrasing (7) with patient shift. The German version of phrasing (7) preserves the intransitive structure of (8) together with the linguistic marking of “the glass” as subject in the nominative case, but simply adds “the man” as the person affected by the breaking of the glass. This addition of (actually irrelevant) information suffices to switch the causal assignment “back to normal,” hence rendering the man as the cause (for related effects of additional yet irrelevant information on causal assignments, see also Beller and Bender,
Part 2 aimed at exploring language-specific effects of verb semantics on causal assignments, which would also allow us to assess possible interferences of verb semantics with the syntactic effects addressed in other parts of the survey. To this end, participants were asked to assign causality on a rating scale for minimal social scenarios based on different verbs. The first group of items consisted of 12 verbs that can be used to describe physical settings (see Table
The causal assignments were coded by measuring participants' marks on the rating scale accurate to 0.5 mm ranging from 0 cm (0% object) when the mark was precisely on the endpoint labeled with the name of the person in the
Assignment of causality in Part 2 on verb causality.
To test effects of implicit verb causality, an analysis of variance was performed with the independent variable
In general, both German and Tongan participants revealed a subject focus, albeit in different proportions: It was stronger for the German participants who assigned less responsibility to the person in the object position (35.5% [95% CI: 32.0; 39.0]) than the Tongan participants (44.3% [41.7; 47.1]). In addition, there was variation across the 16 verbs with ratings for the object as causative ranging from 28.2% ([23.8; 32.6]) for “interrupt” to 49.8% ([45.1; 54.6]) for “displace,” but the causal assignments for the verbs interacted with language. In the German sample, the assignments for all verbs were significantly below 50%, thus indicating a subject focus [largest
For six verbs of the first group, a subsequent
Previous research in Tonga had suggested that giving and helping are considered as a response to what another person needs or requests, and may thus entail a stronger object focus in Tongan than in German. And indeed, the ratings for three out of the four respective verbs (“give,” “offer,” and “help”) differed significantly across languages. In each case, the German verb shows a subject focus, whereas its Tongan counterpart had a tendency toward the object [smallest |
Finally, not all Tongan translations of transitive German verbs are transitive themselves. Roughly two thirds of the verbs scrutinized in Part 2 require the ergative for the subject (e.g., “hit”:
The case of “carry” is particular interesting in this regard, as it is the one verb that allows a comparison across Parts 1 and 2. While in Part 2, the abstract test of verb semantics suggests that “carry” evokes a subject focus in German and tends to evoke an object focus in Tongan, the assignments for “water carries wood” (phrasing [1] in Part 1) exhibited the opposite pattern: Here, Tongan participants were more strongly inclined to assign causality to the subject/water and German participants to the object/wood. In other words, the causality implicit in the verb “carry” has likely dampened a cross-linguistic difference in causal assignments that otherwise may have been even more pronounced. It is thus imperative that future work on causal scenarios, and especially so cross-linguistic research, takes implicit verb causality into consideration.
As mentioned above, the data reported here was part of a larger screening study, which may have two critical implications. First due to the exploratory purpose of the study, we did not scrutinize strong hypotheses, but were interested in probing the potential for cultural influences (including influences by linguistic properties) on causal cognition in the physical domain, where previous research has almost entirely neglected such a potential. Our findings are therefore preliminary and an indication of, rather than strong evidence for, such influences in the physical domain. Second, the fact that the tasks reported here were part of a larger study also implied limitations with regard to the number of items that could be tested and the number of permutations that were possible. This constrains the generalizations we can draw form our findings. For the sake of feasibility of the whole study, for instance, we dispensed with a second version of the floating setting with a forced-choice format, as we already had partial data on it, and we dispensed with a more complete permutation of the content variations. As a consequence, only tentative inferences can be drawn from comparing the different settings on floating and breaking and their response format (Figure
Yet, while both, the shortness in strong hypotheses and the limited comparability across conditions, prevent us from drawing straightforward inferences, the data presented here still suggest that causal cognition in the physical domain is susceptible to cultural and linguistic influences, hence justifying more thorough and in-depth investigations in this direction. Such future research should then also investigate more thoroughly the manner in which these linguistic factors are affecting causal assignment (e.g., by casing, word order, or grammatical hierarchy).
In addition, one of the reviewers raised the question of whether our tasks may reveal more about language comprehension of our participants than about their cognitive processing of the scenario. In the classical study by Loftus and Palmer (
Another concern with the study arises from the differences in average age between the samples. For two reasons, we do not consider this critical. The first reason is that formal education does not prevent people from falling prey to the asymmetry bias (White,
A final concern revolves around the translatability of the material and raises the question of whether, for instance, the verbs used really mean the same in the two languages under scrutiny. This concern is fueled by the findings from Part 2 on implicit verb causality, which indicated substantial differences in causal assignments even in the absence of context information. If, however, a verb invites causal assignment to the agent in one language, yet to the patient in another, the two may entail different connotations as part of their semantics, and hence may not be equivalent in meaning. This implication of our findings deserves to be taken seriously in future research in this field.
The prime objective of the study reported here was to explore whether and how language
In the floating setting without agent, both speakers of German and of Tongan exhibit biases in their causal assignments, but in diverging directions, with German speakers favoring the patient and Tongan speakers favoring the agent, thus largely replicating a pattern found earlier (Beller et al.,
In the following, we discuss these main findings with respect to three issues: the domain-specificity of causal cognition, the ambiguous role of the ergative, and more general differences between languages.
A popular assumption, particularly among developmental psychologists, holds that causal cognition is domain-specific (e.g., Hirschfeld and Gelman,
In each of the two parts of our study, the two domains were compared at least indirectly. Although both the floating setting and the breaking setting of Part 1 on syntactic variations deal with physical situations and thus do not allow for strong conclusions across domains, the introduction of a proper agent in the breaking setting adds a different quality. And although some of the differences between the two tasks may be content-specific, at least the following aspects are noteworthy: First, striking cross-linguistic differences occurred across the board in the floating setting, but not in the breaking setting, where the two groups differed for one syntactic variation only. And second, while linguistic variations did have an effect in the floating setting, even if rather weak, this effect largely disappeared (again with one exception) in the breaking setting.
These differences can be explained in reference to the personal agent and in a related manner. The floating setting describes a symmetric physical relation, and although people tend not to perceive the symmetry (White,
This may even be true for the exceptional case (8) for which the German participants assigned responsibility to the glass (rather than an unknown agent). As suggested by one of the reviewers, this specific sentence may have invoked notions related to a property of glasses, namely that they break easily, rather than notions related to a specific event. While such a property notion is more likely evoked by sentences that use the indefinite noun and a modified verb (as in “Glas bricht leicht” =
The findings of Part 2 on verb causality are more difficult to interpret in this respect. Our selection of verbs is somewhat skewed in comparison to the range that is typically explored in these kinds of studies because the prime goal of this part was to collect data on verb causality for verbs that can be used to describe physical relations. Furthermore, the tasks were implemented as minimal
The main assumption behind our interest in effects of syntactic cues was that differences in the relational structure of languages may affect causality assignment; more specifically, speakers of an ergative language may pay more attention to agents that are marked by the ergative. Previous work examining speakers of an ergative language (Duranti,
Further support was provided by a study on physical settings, where a change from an intransitive description (phrasing [4] “wood floats on water”) to a transitive phrasing with the water in the ergative (phrasing [2] “wood is carried by water”) shifted causal assignments among our Tongan participants more toward the water (Figure
Moreover, the pattern described above could
The pattern observed for implicit verb causality seems to suggest an interaction with the ergative, but in the
Given this mixed pattern of findings, it is difficult to decide whether the presence or absence of ergative case-marking in a given phrasing is actually strong enough a cue to increase or decrease the likelihood of assigning causal power to the agent. Currently, the data from the floating setting—which, with its symmetric configuration and the experimental variation of linguistic cues, can be considered the most informative task for this question—seems to support the former interpretation rather than the latter. Beyond these intra-linguistic cues, however, it seems still plausible that the relational structure of the language (e.g., whether agents of transitive constructions are singled out by specific case marking) may increase the salience of agency as one of their relevant properties.
Teasing apart the influences of culture and language on cognition is by no means a trivial undertaking. Not only is language an essential and integral part of culture, which bedevils any attempt to conceptually distinguish the two; it is also challenging to separate them methodologically (Beller et al.,
This conceptual question aside, at least some general conclusions with regard to diversity and universality in causal cognition can still be drawn (cf. Beller et al.,
Currently, no available theoretical approach is able to account for this. The
Despite the relevance of causal cognition as a core topic for the cognitive sciences, previous research has paid only incidental attention to culture as a possibly constitutive factor (Bender et al.,
All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.
The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG through a grant for the project “Die Zuweisung kausaler Rollen in der physikalischen Domäne” to SB and AB (Be 2178/5-1). We thank the government of Tonga for granting us research permission, and we are grateful to Katalina Lutui, Toka Puleiku, Moana Faka'osi, and the lab of Christoph Klauer for support with data collection, as well as to Melissa Bowerman, Susanne Bubser, Sione Faka'osi, Sarah Mannion de Hernandez, Annelie Rothe-Wulf, Yufuko Takashima, and Heike Wiese for inspiring discussion and/or valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper.
1Please note that part of the data in Panel (B) overlaps with Figure 2B in Bender and Beller (
2Actually, the non-agentive phrasing (8) had also mentioned a possible agent, albeit only indirectly through the two response options given: Half of the participants were offered a choice between “the glass” and “something unknown” (two non-personal options), and the other half were offered a choice between “the glass” and “somebody unknown,” with the latter providing a