An agent-first preference in a patient-first language during sentence comprehension

Abstract

The language comprehension system preferentially assumes that agents come first during incremental processing. While this might reflect a biologically fixed bias, shared with other domains and other species, the evidence is limited to languages that place agents first, and so the bias could also be learned from usage frequency. Here, we probe the bias with electroencephalograph (EEG)y in Äiwoo, a language that by default places patients first, but where sentence-initial nouns are still locally ambiguous between patient or agent roles. Show more