Effect of semantic valence on implicit causality of verbs

Abstract

This work studied the relationship between language and causal attribution. A first aim was to replicate an experiment by Fiedler & Semin (1988) using Italian instead of German; it was found that, when antecedent and consequent of an interpersonal event are inferred, attributions are made to the sentence subject or object according to the type of verb used in the target sentence. A second aim was to test the hypothesis that other variables might affect the attribution of causality, namely, negativity of semantic valence of verb, syntactic form and gender of actors.Fifty‐three subjects (males and females) were given a questionnaire containing 32 items; each item was a subject—verb—object sentence describing an interpersonal event, the antecedent and consequent of which had to be inferred.Results indicate that Fiedler & Semin's effect also is present with the Italian language. Nevertheless, a significant position × verb × valence interaction reveals that, in inferring the antecedent, the effect does not show for verbs with positive semantic valence.