A Dissociation Between Conceptual Prominence and Explicit Category Learning: Evidence From Agent and Patient Event Roles

We investigate whether linguistic categories have the same structure as categories used to conceptualize the world outside of language. We focus on the event roles Agent and Patient (in the sentence Murray ate the ice cream, Murray is the Agent and the ice cream is the Patient). These categories appear to be tightly linked across language and cognition: they are encoded robustly in the world's languages and have been argued to be highly prominent conceptually, even part of innate core knowledge. This view predicts (a) that Agent and Patient categories will be readily accessible to adults in explicit categorization tasks and (b) that these categories have similar structure across semantic and conceptual domains. We tested these predictions across four experiments in which adult speakers of English had to induce Agent and Patient categories from visual illustrations of events (e.g., one figure kicking another). We found that 25% to 40% of participants failed to induce the categories, suggesting that prominent concepts are not always easily accessed for conscious reasoning. At the same time, for those participants who did induce the categories, they generalized these categories in ways predicted by previous analyses of English syntax. This finding supports the view that Agent and Patient are domain-general, spanning both conceptual and linguistic representation, though not necessarily used by participants in explicit categorization tasks.