Occluding the face diminishes the conceptual accessibility of an animate agent

• Published in: Language, cognition and neuroscience Vol. 34; no. 3; pp. 273 - 288
• Main Authors: Rissman, Lilia, Woodward, Amanda, Goldin-Meadow, Susan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 16.03.2019; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Animacy; Comprehension; Concept formation; Encoding (Cognitive process); Event representation; Grammatical subject; Passive voice; Patients; Perceptions; sentence production; Sentences; Syntactic processing

The language that people use to describe events reflects their perspective on the event. This linguistic encoding is influenced by conceptual accessibility, particularly whether individuals in the event are animate or agentive - animates are more likely than inanimates to appear as Subject of a sent...