..a Time upon Once: the role of word order in social cognition

Brief Summary Given its complexity both in structure and meaning, human language is considered a unique form among all living beings' communication channels. There are thousands of extant languages all over the world and each of them differs from others in some features. For decades, scholars have analyzed their language structures and historical development. Nowadays, we are able to distinguish languages and their effects relying on differences highlighted by linguistic and psychological studies. Starting from studies that had focused more on the grammatical and syntactical features of languages, social psychologists have paid particular attention to the mutual influence between language and social cognition. Through several studies, social psychology has tried to demonstrate that language is a powerful tool not only for constructing and representing meaning, but also for transforming social reality. Goal of this research project is to investigate the role of Word Order in social cognition. Although Word Order has been studied in various fields, for example, from typological and from linguistic perspectives, this is a first attempt to investigate how this language feature can affect social-cognitive processes. Subject (S), Verb (V) and Object (O) are considered the basic elements of a sentence and SVO and SOV represent the most common word orders among languages, although all possible word orders are present in at least some languages (Dryer, 2011). The general idea underlying all studies of my Thesis is that the order in which elements appear in a sentence can affect social cognition in terms of perception and reasoning processes. Attention is caught by the first element that we encounter when reading or listening, which, in turn, induces us to construct a mental model following the proposed order. Across several studies, I try to demonstrate how the order and the implied direction in which elements appear are involved in different social-cognitive processes. The majority of studies reported in my Thesis investigate Word Order effects within the context of a single language (Italian) whereas two studies tested the same predictions cross-linguistically. Cultural and personal habits were also taken into account as possible moderators of the Word Order effect (such as knowledge of other languages with different canonical order or motivational factors related to health and eating habits). This research project investigates different aspects of Word Order. It does not only focus on the order of Subject, Verb and Object, but in one set of studies (Chapter 1) I investigated the effects of placing in different order Agent, Patient and Action; in other studies (Chapter 3) I tested the consequences of switching the position of two nouns within a linguistic binomial and, in others (Chapter 4, Study 4a) I also considered the impact of where pronouns were positioned within a help request. Basically, this Thesis did not investigate only the grammatical aspect of the basic elements of a sentence (S, V, O), but it examined the role of order from a broader psycho-linguistic perspective. After reviewing the relevant literature on Word Order from different perspectives in the Introduction, I report three studies through which I investigated the role of word order in linguistic production. The main purpose was to study what linguistic strategies people use when transforming and generating sentences starting from elements that are visually presented. I systematically varied the order in which pictures were presented (for instance, grandma - candies - children; candies- grandma-children; children-candies-grandma, etc.). I hypothesized that regardless of the order in which visual stimuli were presented, people would either follow the same order in which the stimuli were presented or generate sentences in which the pictorial stimuli were transformed into the canonical language order (for instance, SVO in Italian). After a pilot study in Italian, I decided to compare Italian (1a) and English (1b) participants to investigate whether the greater rigidity of English word order with respect to Italian may reveal differences in terms of linguistic strategies application. In Chapter 2 I focus on a yet unexplored link between the word order and causal reasoning. In three studies I investigated how the ordering of cause and effect (e.g., 'cigarette smoking is related to lung cancer' vs. 'lung cancer is related to cigarette smoking') can influence the direction of causal reasoning. Interestingly, results show that by inverting the order of causes and effects, people are driven to adopt different causal thinking in terms of risk and relevance perception of health-related issues. Cause-Effect ordering (vs. Effect-Cause) increases the risk perception but decreases the perception of personal relevance of health-related statements. The relation between Word Order and emergency intervention was further analyzed in Chapter 3. Through implicit and explicit measures I studied how the intervention likelihood and diffusion of responsibility can be affected by the order in which help requests (Study 3a) and risky situations (Study 3b) are formulated. These two studies revealed that language may, in a subtle way, moderate the likelihood of intervention but the underlining process remains unclear and needs future investigation. In Chapter 4, I report two studies aimed at investigating how Word Order can affect causal attribution. The most important result is that, in both, Italian and English, causal attribution is influenced by the order in which elements appear, with greater attribution to the first element of the sentence Together the present research project provides first evidence for a subtle but consistent role of Word Order in social cognitive processes. Besides offering an integrative summary of the findings of Chapters 2 through 5, in the final chapter I also discuss the consequences and applications in the field of social cognition and mass communication.