SPATIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THEMATIC ROLE REPRESENTATION

Humans use language to describe actions by mapping the thematic roles of agent (doer of actions) and patient (recipient of actions) on the g rammatical categories of subject and object. The extent to which thema tic roles can be conceptualized independent of language is not known. If nonlinguistic conceptualization of thematic roles is possible, then representation of these roles would evidence nonlinguistic characteri stics. Motivated by observations in an aphasic man, we wished to learn if thematic roles are conceptualized spatially. Normally subjects wer e asked to draw stick figures depicting the thematic roles of agent an d patient. They demonstrated a systematic spatial bias in locating age nts to the left of where they located patients. This bias, somewhat mi tigated by ordering effects of motor output and auditory input, was br ought into dearest focus when subjects depicted thematic roles in a co ntext stripped of surface sentential form. These data imply that, in t heir nascent form, the thematic roles of agent and patient are spatial ly represented prior to being projected on grammar.