Work

Individual differences in sense of agency and perspective adoption in comprehending Japanese null-subject sentences

Year: 2021

Type: article

Abstract: When comprehending (Japanese) null-subject sentences, people mentally simulate the linguistically depicted events without adopting a particular point-of-view (i.e., perspective) (Sato & Bergen, 2013). The present study examined whether a sense of agency (SoA), measured by the Sense of Agency Scale (Asai et al., 2009), predicts individual preferences in perspective adoption associated with the null-subject sentence comprehension. In the experiment with the sentence-picture verification task, participants read null-subject sentences and decided whether the depicted action had been mentioned in the preceding sentence. The results showed that participants with relatively stable SoA verified the action pictures (e.g., cutting an apple) significantly faster when the event was depicted from an observer’s perspective than when depicted from an agent’s perspective. On the other hand, participants with relatively unstable SoA showed no preference for the pictured perspectives. We concluded that the unstableness of SoA may result in ambiguous attribution of an action, reflected as the absence of a preferred perspective when comprehenders simulate the described event. The reason why individuals with stable SoA prefer an observer’s perspective was also discussed.

Source: The Japanese journal of psychology

DOI: 10.4992/jjpsy.92.19045

Authors: Keiyu Niikuni, Manami Sato, Toshiaki Muramoto

Institutions: Niigata Seiryo University, Tohoku University, Okinawa International University

Language: English

Topic: Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation

Subfield: Language and Linguistics

Field: Arts and Humanities

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: diamond

Funder: Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Awards: Field-based Cognitive Neuroscientific Study of Word Order in Language and Order of Thinking from the OS Language Perspective, Universality and interaction among physical actions, language, and cognition: Comparative study of endangered verb-initial language, English, and Japanese, Perspective adoption in language comprehension: Developmental, cross-cultural, and cross-language aspects, Development of measurement technology and elucidation of cognitive bases of the eight factors of "Power to Live" for educational application