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How do people integrate linguistic information with other statistics that are learned and used during causal reasoning? Recent research suggests that linguistic descriptions of causal events influence blame attribution, availability of causal antecedents and consequents, and event segmentation (see reference list). Might language also influence the properties that are learned about agents and objects in causal events? In the present studies, we parametrically varied the amount of agentive language (“He blicked it”) and non-agentive language (“It blicked”) that co-varied with causal events, and examined people’s attributions about the observed agent and object.

Studies: Agents and Objects