Early Cognitive Study on Instrumental Typicality in Mandarin Thematic Hierarchy
Research on the structured representation of event components at the perceptual/conceptual level has primarily focused on English native speakers,lacking cross-linguistic evidence to substantiate similarities in event cognition.Given the diverse language-specific encoding preferences about subjects observed between Mandarin and English,we draw on evidence from Mandarin-speaking 3-year-olds and 5-year-olds to examine whether the salience of each event component conforms to the asymmetry predicted by the Thematic Hierarchy,a ranking formulated based on English,and whether the typicality of Instruments would pose an effect on the sali-ence of Instruments.In a picture description task,adults,a control group,were overall more informative than children.Notably,children did not necessarily mention Agents frequently.The order of frequency in mentioning other semantic roles is Patient＞Atypical Instru-ment＞Goal＞Typical Instrument.Interestingly,all age groups preferred to mention Atypical Instruments rather than Typical Instru-ments.In a change blindness task,children detected changes in Agents overall precisely,and perceived the changes to Patients more precisely than Goals and Typical Instruments.This behavior mirrored the pattern observed in the Thematic Hierarchy of English.Be-sides,the accuracy of detecting changes to Atypical Instruments was markedly higher than that of Typical Instruments.
万方数据
维普
