ReviewScience advances2022
The evolutionary origins of syntax: Event cognition in nonhuman primates.
Review in Science advances, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 16 papers.
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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.
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Who cites it
16 citing papers in PubMed, 45 citations in OpenAlex.
- The Canadian multi-ethnic research on aging (CAMERA) study: Design, participant characteristics, and preliminary findings.Alzheimer's & dementia : the journal of the Alzheimer's Association · 2026Observational
- The Cross-Linguistic Coordination of Overt Attention and Speech Production as Evidence for a Language of Vision.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
- Cross-modular integration and the missing mechanism in biocultural accounts of language.Frontiers in psychology · 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
- Dogs as a model to study the emergence of concept manipulation skills for language-readiness.Biologia futura · 2025Review
- 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
- A universal preference for animate agents in hominids.iScience · 2024Article
- Surprisal From Language Models Can Predict ERPs in Processing Predicate-Argument Structures Only if Enriched by an Agent Preference Principle.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Decomposing unaccusativity: a statistical modelling approach.Language, cognition and neuroscience · 2024Article
- A comparative study of causal perception in Guinea baboons (Papio papio) and human adults.PloS one · 2024Article
- The Agent Preference in Visual Event Apprehension.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2023Article
- Electrophysiological hallmarks for event relations and event roles in working memory.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Transition to language: From agent perception to event representation.Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science · 2022Article
- Revisiting the relation between syntax, action, and left BA44.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2022Review
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Languages tend to encode events from the perspective of agents, placing them first and in simpler forms than patients. This agent bias is mirrored by cognition: Agents are more quickly recognized than patients and generally attract more attention. This leads to the hypothesis that key aspects of language structure are fundamentally rooted in a cognition that decomposes events into agents, actions, and patients, privileging agents. Although this type of event representation is almost certainly universal across languages, it remains unclear whether the underlying cognition is uniquely human or more widespread in animals. Here, we review a range of evidence from primates and other animals, which suggests that agent-based event decomposition is phylogenetically older than humans. We propose a research program to test this hypothesis in great apes and human infants, with the goal to resolve one of the major questions in the evolution of language, the origins of syntax.
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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.