Mapping Concepts onto Linguistic Structure: The Case of Animacy

Abstract

A central question in cognitive science is how speakers map meaning onto syntactic structure. Recent research examining the active-passive alternation suggests that conceptual features such as animacy influence sentence structure indirectly by influencing how relational meanings such as thematic roles map onto sentences. The current study examined whether animacy can directly influence linear order priming in noun conjunctions, which lack thematic roles. In a picture-description task, Experiment 1 showed that the linear order of noun conjunctions (e.g., a thief and a lorry vs. a lorry and a thief) could be primed based on animacy order (animate-first vs. inanimate-first) and/or spatial naming order (left-to-right vs. right-to-left). Experiment 2 provided evidence for direct mapping: the prime’s animacy order, but not its spatial naming order, was more likely to persist when either the animate or inanimate noun was repeated from prime to target. This contrasts with findings from the active-passive alternation, showing that only verb, not noun, repetition enhances structural persistence. These findings reveal distinct pathways through which feature-based and relational meanings are mapped onto linguistic structure during language production.