Who dun it? The influence of actor-patient animacy and type of verb in the making of causal attributions

Abstract

Several recent studies have claimed that English verbs that describe interactions between two participants (e.g., Dave helped John) have inherent causality that gives greater weight to one of the two interactants. In this study verb type and animacy of the sentence participants were varied orthogonally in order to determine whether the verb alone was responsible for people's causality attributions. College students were asked to judge why the particular experience or activity described in a sentence had occurred. Three classes of verbs were used. Verb type interacted with animacy such that the students consistently attributed causality to the sentence subject for some verb types and to the sentence object for others, depending upon the animacy of the subjects and objects. The students' causality ratings were related to prototypicality ratings of the same stimuli from a previous study. Causality ratings were also sensitive to the type of task (rating vs. free-response). Results are discussed in terms of the notion of event schema as it applies to sentences. In particular, the animacy of different participants in the schema interacts with different types of actions or states to alter people's judgments about which schema part is targeted as unusual, hence causal.