ReviewPsychonomic bulletin & review2019
Thematic roles: Core knowledge or linguistic construct?
Review in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
25 citing papers in PubMed.
- Do Language Models Know Who Did What to Whom?Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Broadening the Agent Preference Hypothesis Through Experiencers: Eye-Tracking and EEG Evidence of Proto-Agents and Proto-Patients.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2026Article
- Conceptualisation of event roles in L1 and L2 by Japanese learners of english: the effect of perspectives of event construal on recognition memory.Psychological research · 2025Article
- Scope of Message Planning: Evidence From Production of Sentences With Heavy Sentence-Final NPs.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Dogs as a model to study the emergence of concept manipulation skills for language-readiness.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- The Geometry and Dynamics of Meaning.Topics in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Spontaneous Encoding of Event Roles in Hominids.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2025Article
- Humans and great apes visually track event roles in similar ways.PLoS biology · 2024Article
- The child the apple eats: processing of argument structure in Mandarin verb-final sentences.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- A universal preference for animate agents in hominids.iScience · 2024Article
- The Representation of Giving Actions: Event Construction in the Service of Monitoring Social Relationships.Current directions in psychological science · 2024Article
- Infants' understanding of the causal power of agents and tools.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Cognitive Neuroscience Perspectives on Language Acquisition and Processing.Brain sciences · 2023Article
- Electrophysiological hallmarks for event relations and event roles in working memory.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- The Agent Preference in Visual Event Apprehension.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2023Article
- The verb-self link: An implicit association test study.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Article
- The evolutionary origins of syntax: Event cognition in nonhuman primates.Science advances · 2022Review
- Evidence for a Shared Instrument Prototype from English, Dutch, and German.Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Mandarin and English Event Cognitive Alignment From Corpus-Based Semantic Fusion Model Perspective.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The status of thematic roles such as Agent and Patient in cognitive science is highly controversial: To some they are universal components of core knowledge, to others they are scholarly fictions without psychological reality. We address this debate by posing two critical questions: to what extent do humans represent events in terms of abstract role categories, and to what extent are these categories shaped by universal cognitive biases? We review a range of literature that contributes answers to these questions: psycholinguistic and event cognition experiments with adults, children, and infants; typological studies grounded in cross-linguistic data; and studies of emerging sign languages. We pose these questions for a variety of roles and find that the answers depend on the role. For Agents and Patients, there is strong evidence for abstract role categories and a universal bias to distinguish the two roles. For Goals and Recipients, we find clear evidence for abstraction but mixed evidence as to whether there is a bias to encode Goals and Recipients as part of one or two distinct categories. Finally, we discuss the Instrumental role and do not find clear evidence for either abstraction or universal biases to structure instrumental categories.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.