Implicit causality biases and thematic roles in American Sign Language

Implicit causality (IC) biases, the tendency of certain verbs to elicit re-mention of either the first-mentioned noun phrase (NP1) or the second-mentioned noun phrase (NP2) from the previous clause, are important in psycholinguistic research. Understanding IC verbs and the source of their biases in signed as well as spoken languages helps elucidate whether these phenomena are language general or specific to the spoken modality. As the first of its kind, this study investigates IC biases in American Sign Language (ASL) and provides IC bias norms for over 200 verbs, facilitating future psycholinguistic studies of ASL and comparisons of spoken versus signed languages. We investigated whether native ASL signers continued sentences with IC verbs (e.g., ASL equivalents of ‘Lisa annoys Maya because…’) by mentioning NP1 (i.e., Lisa) or NP2 (i.e., Maya). We found a tendency towards more NP2-biased verbs. Previous work has found that a verb’s thematic roles predict bias direction: stimulus-experiencer verbs (e.g., ‘annoy’), where the first argument is the stimulus (causing annoyance) and the second argument is the experiencer (experiencing annoyance), elicit more NP1 continuations. Verbs with experiencer-stimulus thematic roles (e.g., ‘love’) elicit more NP2 continuations. We probed whether the trend towards more NP2-biased verbs was related to an existing claim that stimulus-experiencer verbs do not exist in sign languages. We found that stimulus-experiencer structure, while permitted, is infrequent, impacting the IC bias distribution in ASL. Nevertheless, thematic roles predict IC bias in ASL, suggesting that the thematic role-IC bias relationship is stable across languages as well as modalities.