Language
Do some nouns sound more like 'doers' to the brain?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Nouns that people judge as better potential 'doers' of actions (for example, human, powerful, emotionally striking and goal-directed) are processed more easily as sentence subjects, even before the verb appears.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Experiment 1: online rating questionnaire of 180 German nouns modelled with structural equation modelling to give each noun an actor-potential score; Experiment 2: ERP reading study with verb-final German wh-clauses varying word order and noun actor potential.
- N
- Experiment 1: 198 raters analysed (of 227); cross-validation rating study: 67 participants; Experiment 2 (ERP): 41 tested, one excluded for software problems.
- Population
- Native German speakers, mostly university students
- Outcome
- Noun actor-potential (ACT) scores; N400 mean amplitude (300-500 ms) at the critical noun; comprehension accuracy and reaction time
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Key findings
Actor potential was best captured by humanness, emotional arousal, potency and goal-directedness, while activity-related scales did not help, and the score correlated with separate intuitive ratings of how good an 'event instigator' each noun was. In the ERP study, nouns with low actor potential produced a larger N400, and this effect was stronger when the noun had to be the actor and for high-frequency nouns. The effect remained when only human nouns were analysed, so it was not simply an animacy effect.
Methodology
In Experiment 1, German speakers rated 180 nouns (humans, animals, objects and abstract concepts) on semantic scales such as power, strength, size, pleasantness, animacy and goal-directedness, and a structural equation model combined these into one 'actor potential' score per noun. In Experiment 2, participants read verb-final German embedded questions in which the critical noun was either the actor (object-first order) or the undergoer (subject-first order) while EEG was recorded.
Limitations
The findings come from one language (German) and a single sentence construction, so it is unknown whether actor potential works the same way in other languages or structures. Raters could not be asked about the technical linguistic notion of 'actor', so the validation used the narrower idea of an 'event instigator'. The ACT effect also appeared, more weakly, when the noun was not the actor, and interacted with word frequency, which complicates a clean interpretation of what the N400 reflects here.
How this study connects
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